Building 7 a response to @YVeilleuxLepage

To YVeilleuxLepage :

 

A hypothesis is indeed a proposed explanation for something that can actually be tested, and that's why I used the word. NIST tested their hypothesis at Underwriters Laboratories, where a partial reconstruction of WTC7 was subjected to heat, to see if their prediction was correct. Unfortunately, NIST (as I understand it) have not been prepared to make most of that raw data available for peer review, and (as I pointed out in my reply to Daniel Margrain) former employees at UL have stated that some of the data which did appear in the report had been tampered with by NIST, in an attempt to make those results fit the hypothesis. That is one of several reasons why many people have expressed doubts as to the credibility of the NIST report.

 

To recap. My original tweet and subsequent post were both written simply to highlight the glaring contradiction in the official explanation for what happened to WTC7, which essentially consists of two strands:

 

a) the collapse can be innocently explained away by localised fires which caused a central column suddenly to give way, bringing the entire building down with it, in an event that was unforeseeable, and was unique in the history of high-rise steel-frame building (as outlined in the NIST report);

 

b) premature news reports of WTC7's collapse can be innocently explained away by fire officers having predicted to reporters that it would collapse, more than three hours before it did so.

 

Like many people, I see a fundamental inconsistency between a) and b), and am doubtful that they can both be true. 

 

As for your definition of the word "facts", Karl Popper readily acknowledged that there is a difference between how words are used in a narrow philosophical sense, and how they are used in general discourse; and if you joined Twitter because you believed it to be a forum for the former, rather than the latter, then I fear that you have been cruelly misled. The first definition of "fact" in most English dictionaries is "A thing that is known or proved to be true", and my use of the word complied with that standard definition. Lastly, I was utterly bemused by your statement that "I'll recommend you abandoned Alex Jones and pick up Karl Popper", because although the famous and feisty Welsh presenter of BBC1's "The One Show" is no dunderhead, I'm not sure she's ever considered herself to be in the running for a professorship in Logic and Scientific Method at a leading university, nor is she a known advocate of empirical falsification. However, after checking on Google, I discovered that there is also another obscure Alex Jones, who deals in conspiracy theories and shouts a lot, and presumably you were referring to that one. Conspiracy theories are not something that has ever interested me, hence my initial failure to comprehend your allusion.

 

Victor Lewis-Smith