Debunked: AE911Truth's WTC7 Explosive Demolition Hypothesis

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External peer review was not conducted on the NIST "model" as critical data was withheld from independent experts under the terms of the NCST Act 2002 (using the absurd argument that it would "jeopardize public safety" if independent structural engineers are allowed to check NIST's conclusions); however analysis has been made of NIST's model and with the inclusion of critical elements that NIST omitted it has been shown that column 79 could not trigger the collapse, a conclusion discussed elsewhere in this forum.
No, that hasn't been shown. What AE911T claims could not occur is the girder walk off as described by NIST. Certainly everything required to analyze that specific issue IS available to any qualified person.
AFASIK the data being withheld is for the FEA of the collapse progression. There were two done, the first has WTC7 in pristine condition and then column 79 is failed, the second includes the observed south side structural damage.
 
What AE911T claims could not occur is the girder walk off
Yeah.

Pseudoscience: wear blinkers so there's only one item of "evidence" suiting one's preconception. Success.

Now run off to stand in front of engineers and tell them how wrong they are. Be baffled by their scorn. Wonder how much money they took. Take to religion...
 
What is presented as science but is independently unverifiable is accurately described as pseudoscience; the NIST "model" is independently unverifiable.
 
however analysis has been made of NIST's model and with the inclusion of critical elements that NIST omitted it has been shown that column 79 could not trigger the collapse, a conclusion discussed elsewhere in this forum.

Not true. The claim made by @gerrycan, et al, was that a particular girder connection would not have failed in the manner suggested by NIST. This did not show that a failure of C79 could not trigger the collapse (as there were lots of other failures, the connection could have failed in other ways, the connection certainly at least approached failure in the manner NIST suggested, and this was not a key failure in the simulations). There was much hand waving to attempt to say that this one omission of a stiffener plate meant that every single statement in the NIST WTC7 report was now false. The discussion is in the link below (and should be added to in that thread, if you really want)
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/critical-errors-and-omissions-in-wtc7-report-uncovered.2332/
 
What is presented as science but is independently unverifiable is accurately described as pseudoscience; the NIST "model" is independently unverifiable.
I verify it.

It isn't perfectly accurate (some aspects were never subject to view) but its analytical approach, its composition and expression, are all first-class, and of a quality no-one in AE911T could ever appreciate or approach.

The rest of us have moved on.

.
 
How can a forensic investigation that doesn't so much as mention physical evidence from the building - in particular the steel from the building that an earlier preliminary investigation said should be analysed further because of its mysterious condition - be described as "first class"?
 
How can a forensic investigation that doesn't so much as mention physical evidence from the building - in particular the steel from the building that an earlier preliminary investigation said should be analysed further because of its mysterious condition - be described as "first class"?

That's off topic, and semantic. Please keep to the topic of the ten points on AE911's infographic covered in the OP.
 
You cannot "debunk" an hypothesis by showing flaws in the arguments offered to support it. Exposing such flaws merely shows that the given argument does not support the hypothesis. To give an example. They hypothesis that all thermally radiating black bodies will adhere to Wien displacement is not supported by the arguments of naive classical physics. Furthermore, the fact that quantum physics does support the Wien hypothesis does not disprove the validity of the deterministic hypothesis of neo-classical physics.
 
You cannot "debunk" an hypothesis by showing flaws in the arguments offered to support it. <<snip extraneous off topic word salad>>
In fact if the flaws fatally wound the hypothesis then it has been "debunked".

Then again wrt the cause of collapse of the WTC structures ( or at least 3 out of 7 of them) there has never been any actual hypothesis put forth by anyone other than NIST.

There have been hand waving arguements for explosives, a few have made bald assertions, others have put forth completely unsubstantiated speculations, but no fleshed out hypothesis.
 
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You cannot "debunk" an hypothesis by showing flaws in the arguments offered to support it. Exposing such flaws merely shows that the given argument does not support the hypothesis.
Very strange. If the justification used to support the hypothesis is shown to be flawed, what makes the hypothesis worth considering?
 
You cannot "debunk" an hypothesis by showing flaws in the arguments offered to support it. Exposing such flaws merely shows that the given argument does not support the hypothesis. To give an example. They hypothesis that all thermally radiating black bodies will adhere to Wien displacement is not supported by the arguments of naive classical physics. Furthermore, the fact that quantum physics does support the Wien hypothesis does not disprove the validity of the deterministic hypothesis of neo-classical physics.

Showing the flaws in an argument that support a hypothesis is what debunking is. But let's not get distracted with semantics. I point out a bunch of problems with the AE911 hypothesis.
 
If "debunking" means the same thing as disproof by scientific method, then disproving an assertion offered in support of an hypothesis does not disprove the hypothesis. I have not read this, but I know what is says: http://www.iep.utm.edu/desc-sci/ Shall I demonstrate
 
If hypothesis is a result of reason a + b + c, and reason a, b and c are shown to be faulty, the hypothesis is sustained by nothing and is debunked.
eg.
- 'I think (x) because (y).'
- 'I have proven (not y), therefore (not x).'
- 'I still think (x).'
How is that logically defensible?
 
If "debunking" means the same thing as disproof by scientific method, then disproving an assertion offered in support of an hypothesis does not disprove the hypothesis. I have not read this, but I know what is says: http://www.iep.utm.edu/desc-sci/ Shall I demonstrate

Debunking means removing bunk. Like debugging means removing bugs. If you debug some code it does not then mean that there are no bugs in it.
 
The hypothesis displayed in the OP is really nothing more than a collection of bald suppositions and assertions each of which can be shown to be in error or not supported by any data or research.

For instance the assertion that free fall is an exclusive parameter of explosive demolition. Is it? How is this assertion supported? Is it simply the assumption that a complex failure will behave exactly like the most simplistic model possible, that removing all support causes an object to fall? Has there been a study of demolitions and non-demolitions collapses?
 
You cannot "debunk" an hypothesis by showing flaws in the arguments offered to support it. Exposing such flaws merely shows that the given argument does not support the hypothesis. To give an example. They hypothesis that all thermally radiating black bodies will adhere to Wien displacement is not supported by the arguments of naive classical physics. Furthermore, the fact that quantum physics does support the Wien hypothesis does not disprove the validity of the deterministic hypothesis of neo-classical physics.
You cannot "debunk" a hypothesis as such. But neither an "undebunked" nor a "debunked" hypothesis has any value beyond merely being "a hypothesis". Which is to say it has no value at all.

It isn't a case, it isn't a principle, it isn't a law. It isn't a fact.

Except the memetic part of it. It's a meme. Religion, Communism, and Nazism are memes too.
 
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If hypothesis is a result of reason a + b + c, and reason a, b and c are shown to be faulty, the hypothesis is sustained by nothing and is debunked.
eg.
- 'I think (x) because (y).'
- 'I have proven (not y), therefore (not x).'
- 'I still think (x).'
How is that logically defensible?

I agree with your general point: that debunking involves examining the evidence for a claim, and rejecting that evidence if it's bunk. In general this is not enough to falsify the claim itself: in many cases, conclusive falsification of a claim would require proving a universal negative, which can't be done.

But your second step goes too far; proving (not y), where y has been cited as evidence of x, does not prove (not x).

Example: I claim 5,915,587,277 is prime, and when asked how I know this, I say that it was revealed to me by the goddess Lakshmi on New Year's Eve, 2013. You show that Lakshmi was addressing a meeting of the Cleveland Kiwanis that evening, and hence could not have revealed this information to me on that date. But you have not thereby proved that 5,915,587,277 is composite.
 
All semantics. I wasn't try to falsify the theory, I was addressing the individual claims of evidence.

Debunking is not "proving wrong", it's "removing bunk".
 
Example: I claim 5,915,587,277 is prime, and when asked how I know this, I say that it was revealed to me by the goddess Lakshmi on New Year's Eve, 2013.

Well, interesting use of an analogy, but my critical mind led me to actually use the computer, and the Internet (both available even in the year 2013).

Turns out that the number (5,915,587,277) is likely a Prime:
http://primes.utm.edu/lists/small/small.html

Ten random 10 digit primes
  • 5915587277
Content from External Source

SO, simple and easy-peasy!! (In the modern era, anyways).

In this instance, then...the example of "Is, or Isn't It?" a Prime (above) is easily answered, AND if a claim is made that it isn't, it can then be considered "bunk" (the claim, that is).
 
But your second step goes too far; proving (not y), where y has been cited as evidence of x, does not prove (not x).
Yeah that's true, but my point would be it makes belief in (x) a faith, not a conclusion based on evidence leading to it.
(x) may still be true, but the 'why' for convincing another of it has disappeared.
And sometimes (x) cannot be falsified, things that do not exist have no final proof.

But I think we are making what debunking is more complicated than it needs be.
 
You cannot "debunk" a hypothesis as such. But neither an "undebunked" nor a "debunked" hypothesis has any value beyond merely being "a hypothesis". Which is to say it has no value at all.

It isn't a case, it isn't a principle, it isn't a law. It isn't a fact.

Except the memetic part of it. It's a meme. Religion, Communism, and Nazism are memes too.

Actually, isn't the whole 9/11 "Truth" movement more dogma, than a meme?
 
Same thing.
Meme is a self-replicating idea.
A meme (/ˈmiːm/ meem)[1] is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."[2] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.[3]
 
All very interesting, the discussion of the definition of 'hypothesis", "meme", "dogma", however we are refering here to "debunking". It can be shown that the claims that the AE911T "hypothesis" stands on are not proven, bald assertion, or simply wrong. IOW they are "bunk". It follows then that it the themes upon which the "hypothesis stands are bunk then so too is the "hypothesis".
 
IIRC, "pyroclastic cloud" was first used by Hoffman in reference to the dust cloud from the tower collapses. He went on to calculate that the clouds must have been several hundred degrees Celcius. That itself was proven to be incorrect as there were people who were engulfed in that cloud and were not burned let alone killed, there were street signs engulfed by that cloud and showed no indication of having been heated, etc.

Yet for some inexplicable reason, the very obvious misnomer has remained in use by AE911T.
 
IIRC, "pyroclastic cloud" was first used by Hoffman in reference to the dust cloud from the tower collapses. He went on to calculate that the clouds must have been several hundred degrees Celcius. That itself was proven to be incorrect as there were people who were engulfed in that cloud and were not burned let alone killed, there were street signs engulfed by that cloud and showed no indication of having been heated, etc.

Yet for some inexplicable reason, the very obvious misnomer has remained in use by AE911T.

The only thing I can think of jay, is that its a good description of what the cloud looked like. It does look very much like a pyroclastic cloud.. Using it as a descriptor for a visual representation vs using it as an accurate description of what it really was, I whole heartedly agree, is asinine.
 
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Plain old "roiling dust cloud" would have been as descriptive and much more accurate.

At any rate, Hoffman is [wrong]. It was not a high temp cloud.
 
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Using it as a descriptor for a visual representation vs using it as an accurate description of what it really was, I whole heartedly agree, is asinine.
More. Inevitable considering the manner and the medium in which it was deployed.
 
2. Debris falls to the side but anyone with eyes can see in the video that it was a straight down collapse :confused:
Also why dont you mention that there was structural damage to the buildings from the twin towers before wtc 7..

10. The Fema report of molten steel like swiss cheese, dude you are a liar
 
2. Debris falls to the side but anyone with eyes can see in the video that it was a straight down collapse :confused:
Also why dont you mention that there was structural damage to the buildings from the twin towers before wtc 7..
Actually the west two thirds of the structure is already falling back (to the south) in the video.
Post #1, item 2. Mick includes a photo with the caption that describes that part of WTC7 fell on buildings already destroyed. Sorry you missed that.
However, in the case of the Fitterman building, to the NE of WTC7, that structure suffered no damage due to the collapse of the towers, other than to have been coated with dust. when WTC 7 collapsed though, it received a large gouge and eventually had to be taken down
10. The Fema report of molten steel like swiss cheese, dude you are a liar

TWO samples of eutectic corrison. TWO, and two only found. There is absolutely no connection, that has been established, to indicate that this is in any way linked to the cause of collapse. Its AE911T and others grasping at straws.

That said, your characterization of "molten steel like swiss cheese" is both incorrect and nonsensical.
 
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2. Debris falls to the side but anyone with eyes can see in the video that it was a straight down collapse :confused:
Also why dont you mention that there was structural damage to the buildings from the twin towers before wtc 7..

10. The Fema report of molten steel like swiss cheese, dude you are a liar

Even if the above were correct, then is a possibly 2 out of 10 a good reason to agree with AE911? The broader point here is that AE911 makes these silly infographics that largely contain specious, anecdotal, conflicting, or nonsensical claims.
 
How is it incorrect or nonsensical? Is it not important that there was steel found that was melted straight through underneath a building collapse? It is not corrosion .. It was melted straight through,''Swiss cheese'' was FEMA's own words not mine.A eutectic mixture of molten iron and sulpur!
AE911 have shown that the NIST computer simulation does not match the observed collapse at all.. and is based totally on assumptions, I call that Bunk. 2 samples of steel were taken by FEMA because THEY thought it was very important and so did other investigators, Because NIST did not tests on those steels is screaming criminal negligence or conspiracy to cover up the melting of steel on 911. Lack of evidence isn't evidence to the contrary especially when all that evidence was removed and destroyed and never properly tested.
 
How is it incorrect or nonsensical? Is it not important that there was steel found that was melted straight through underneath a building collapse? It is not corrosion .. It was melted straight through,''Swiss cheese'' was FEMA's own words not mine.A eutectic mixture of molten iron and sulpur!
AE911 have shown that the NIST computer simulation does not match the observed collapse at all.. and is based totally on assumptions, I call that Bunk. 2 samples of steel were taken by FEMA because THEY thought it was very important and so did other investigators, Because NIST did not tests on those steels is screaming criminal negligence or conspiracy to cover up the melting of steel on 911. Lack of evidence isn't evidence to the contrary especially when all that evidence was removed and destroyed and never properly tested.

Maybe they need to make a new list then, with just the points they think are valid.
 
How is it incorrect or nonsensical? Is it not important that there was steel found that was melted straight through underneath a building collapse? It is not corrosion .. It was melted straight through,''Swiss cheese'' was FEMA's own words not mine.A eutectic mixture of molten iron and sulpur!
It could be important IF it were a widespread phenomena, there IS NO evidence that it was.
. Lack of evidence isn't evidence to the contrary especially when all that evidence was removed and destroyed and never properly tested.
Lack of evidence is just that, a LACK of supporting evidence. That said the steel that was removed from the site was taken to Fresh Kills and examined there. There is no record that there were any more examples of this corrosion. Wishing it were so simply cannot make your case for you.
 
and guess what there is ZERO evidence , yes ZERO evidence that the towers collapsed due to thermal expansion or weakening of the steel due to fire.....
Thats what happens when the evidence is destroyed.

University of California professor Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, the first structural engineergiven access to the WTC steel at Fresh Kills Landfill notes, “I saw melting of girders at the World Trade Center.” Astaneh also “describes the connections [between supporting columns] as being smoothly warped: ‘If you remember the Salvador Dalí paintings with the clocks that are kind of melted – it’s kind of like that. That could only happen if you get steel yellow hot or white hot – perhaps around 2,000 degrees.’”.
Content from External Source
 
and guess what there is ZERO evidence , yes ZERO evidence that the towers collapsed due to thermal expansion or weakening of the steel due to fire.....
Thats what happens when the evidence is destroyed.

University of California professor Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, the first structural engineergiven access to the WTC steel at Fresh Kills Landfill notes, “I saw melting of girders at the World Trade Center.” Astaneh also “describes the connections [between supporting columns] as being smoothly warped: ‘If you remember the Salvador Dalí paintings with the clocks that are kind of melted – it’s kind of like that. That could only happen if you get steel yellow hot or white hot – perhaps around 2,000 degrees.’”.
Content from External Source
Aside from the fact that your statement is untrue....
Your expert holds that there is no credibility in the notion of controlled demolition, nor the use of therm?the.
Perhaps you'd also like to quote the CBTUH and their queries concerning WTC7 report as well. Whoops, better not, as they too have come out and unequivocally stated that the truth movement assertions have no credibility.

"Melting" girders is a non-specific reference to structural and elements that were both at elevated temperature, and under a LOAD. There is also really no issue with connections getting to around 1000 degrees C. That is a typical temp for a structure fire. Its even the rating temperature for stainless steel chimney for wood stoves.
 
I did not fail to notice that Hamish diverted the discussion away from the OP. The OP refers to the alternative "hypothesis" put forth by AE911T.

Hamish, you called out Mick for not mentioning damage to other structures by the collapse debris of the towers. This accusation is shown to be patently false and that it is there in one of the pictures in Mick's OP, clearly labeled in large print. In addition, the Fitterman building, to the NE of WTC7, suffered a great deal of impact damage from WTC7 and had to be torn down later. That structure suffered no damage at all from the collapse of the towers other than being covered in dust.
Care to retract your accusation yet?
 
AE911 have shown that the NIST computer simulation does not match the observed collapse at all.. and is based totally on assumptions, I call that Bunk.
This is also untrue.
NIST did two fea's of the collapse. One had the structure whole and then modeled a failure of col79.
The second run included the damage to the south face, the most significant of which was the loss of the SW corner column.
The first run resulted in a slower collapse progression to global failure and saw the structure twist a great deal.
The second run saw a faster progression to global collapse and less twisting and was consistent with the observed collapse. It did not exactly match the observed collapse nor would any such modeling of this large a structure ever be expect to exactly conform to observation.

Perhaps, however, since you seem to conflate many issues, you refer to the contention that the initial failure hypothesized by NIST, the girder walk off, is what AE911T say is illustrated could not occur.

AE911T comes up with the girder flange still having one inch remaining on the girder seat. ONE inch , in a hot environment. They call for a reinvestigation of this single event to include all structural elements left out in the NIST analysis. OK, fine, but careful what you wish for because in the NIST analysis they also modelled an intimately stiff girder seat and no movement of col79, nor did the account for floor slab expansion(iirc).

Though it should be noted that modelling of the expansion of another girder, that between col 79 and 76 showed enough force to move col 79 to the east by half an inch.
 
As explained by someone who knows how finite element analysis is applied:
JayUtah;9930043 said:
The elephant in the room for Truthers is that this type of forensic analysis is not simply a matter of programming a computer, running the model, and then mindlessly publishing whatever appears at the bottom of the printout.

While ANSYS and similar tools have revolutionized both design and forensic engineering, they are not be-all and end-all tools for reasoning about failures. Especially in a forensic context, NIST and others are well aware that any computer simulation model is based on a number of assumptions and estimates for values that cannot be known, and mechanisms that cannot have been observed. It is an effort to understand the various things that may have happened in as objective a manner as possible.

As such the result of simulation is never trusted as the inevitable determination of what must have happened. Conversely, minute discrepancies between what the model determines and what is theorized to have occurred do not doom the theory. Simulation is one of many tools brought into play.

Why add a stiffener here that isn't in the design? Because structure joints can fail in several ways, and conscientious forensic engineering examines how probable each failure mode may be in isolation as well as in combination. To determine the likelihood of failure by walk-off alone, you gimmick the model so that the seat off of which the girder might walk cannot itself fail and thus undermine your experiment. Similarly to investigate the possibility of seat failure, you might artificially "fasten" the girder to its seat either by upping the yield strength of the designed fasteners to some magically infrangible value, or alternatively tell the model that the girder and its seat are the same piece of metal. The point in either case is to keep the girder loads coupled to the seat no matter what, as the simulation progresses over time.

If you do this, it's not to doctor the study to reach a predetermined conclusion. It's because you're using the simulation tool the way it's meant to be used -- to investigate a range of possibilities and determine which is most likely and which are patently unlikely, by changing variables and characteristics of the problem to build up a picture of overall behavior. We use fine-grained simulation as the tool because it combines very small and simple effects into a macro-scale observation in a way that avoids any bias that might arise from assumptions at the macro scale.

In another way, it's the same philosophy the Mythbusters use to determine likelihood of outcomes: first they try to replicate the purported event using reported or reasonable values, then they achieve the observed outcome at any cost to determine what would be required to replicate the event. We use simulation at times to "bound" problems to reasonable safety and performance envelopes using both reasonable and unreasonable values for unknowns.

This is why the inch or so of errata isn't significant. The purpose of the model is to determine whether the higher-level theory of failure mode is plausible, not whether it must have happened according to every detail the computer is able to spit out. Not all those spat-out details matter, nor are confident values. The purpose of the model with the gimmicked seat is to isolate the hypothesized walk-off behavior and put some sort of qualitative validation and quantitative ballpark value to it. That the beam walked to within an inch or so of falling off is validation enough for the conclusion that was drawn on it -- which was not a supremely confident conclusion. Why? Because the model deals only in constitutive relationships and simply doesn't involve, embody, or capture all the physical effects that may come into play in the real world. You can easily attribute the final inch to variables that exist in the real world but that can't be modeled easily. Yes, it's a crap-shoot, but that's why this sort of analysis is still partially an art.

Further, as we discussed, models are frequently optimized toward a certain kind of observable outcome. This is because Time-To-Solution is a cost factor in this type of analysis. I dealt with that at length so I'll take it as read and move on to an illustration of the qualitative limitation argument above it.

In our work for Boeing in the early 2000s developing the wing for the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, we were hobbled by limitations in the existing algorithms for structural analysis and fluid dynamics. Basically at that time the two were independent regimes of simulation that did not work well together.

Fluid dynamics is the body of physics that describes the motion of fluids through environments composed of solid objects, incorporating all the classic fluid effects -- especially for gases, the models that incorporate varying temperature and pressure. Computational fluid dynamics is the investigation of those effects by simulation according to finite-element methods: little "packets" of air that interact with each other and with solid surfaces according to constitutive relationships derived from classic gas laws and from the Navier-Stokes models.

Structural dynamics has been discussed here. Computational structural dynamics is the application of finite-element methods to problems in indeterminate mechanics with constitutive relationships defined according to classic mechanics of materials.

Both are required in wing design. CSD determines the behavior of the wing structure under flight loads. CFD determines the aerodynamic viability of an airfoil of a given shape. But in the real world, these regimes interact such that aerodynamic loads affect wing shape, and wing shape in turn determines airflow. Boeing has proprietary CFD methods that achieve more accurate results using less computer time by means of non-unform elements. Our job was to integrate classic CSD methods with the proprietary CFD methods and derived integrated constitutive relationships at the wing-slipstream boundary. This was not new math at the time, but very few practical solutions to this problem existed at the time.

Prevailing computer methods produced structural solutions that were valid in the structural regime, and airflow models that were valid in the fluid dynamics regime. But in order to to get usable fluid-dynamics answers for our previous Boeing work, we had to manually "flex" the wing into the in-flight shape, i.e., manually simulate the effect of aerodynamic loads on the wing. This is because the wing in the early CFD models is not a flexible structure; it is assumed to be rigid and immovable, and we had to make it "rigid and immovable" at a certain pre-flexed position.

This is suitable for the design goals of the 1990s and early 2000s. We accepted that the computer simulations would produce only approximations of the actual behavior, that other analytical tools would be needed to round out the design and projected performance of the airfoils, and that design and operational envelopes would necessitate margins for safety at the expense of performance.

The Dreamliner aspired to a more efficient design where the structure of the wing could safely accept a narrower design margin, and the aerodynamic behavior could be known confidently across a wide range of structural responses. More importantly, the interactive behavior of the wing system in flight was more likely to be revealed in the coupled model.​

The lesson here is that any computer simulation is ever only based on a subset of the variables at play, arising from a select few of the bodies of physical law (e.g., materials, acoustic, thermal, mechanics, chemical) that naturally apply. The models implement constitutive relationships only -- a sort of theater-scenery mock-up of the actual underlying behaviors. These break down in some situations, and are predictive only within a certain epsilon even within their useful range. And combining them from different regimes, as discussed above, is problematic for reasons of the underlying mechanics, and vastly consumptive of computing resources -- roughly O(N(N-1)/2) over single-regime models. (I deployed about $20 million worth of supercomputer clusters to perform the above analysis.)

Because those who are adept in the use of these tools know the nature and quantity of the limitations imposed, and because they are used to employing them in what-if scenarios that depart here and there from ground-truth reality, they generally don't look at NIST's conclusions as necessarily wrong or necessarily based on "flawed" models.

What is happening here is that the Truth movement is counting on their followers adopting the layman's "crystal ball" view of computer analysis (which is instead a highly-specialized art and science) and buying into the hooey about meaningless and irrelevant "flaws" in the models and completely overblown assertions about the role of such analysis in overall findings. It is understandable when laymen look at the computer analysis and see what they believe to be suspicious behavior. It's inexcusable when people in the engineering profession deliberately misrepresent the characteristics of computer modeling and its role in an overall engineering decision-making process.

But hopefully this sheds some light on why we use these models and how the NIST use of them does not lie outside ordinary engineering practice.
 
Absolutely. I doubt that I could have been as succinct, or as detailed, and am relieved not to have been compelled to undertake basically the same explanation from a position just outside that field.

That was just the ticket. Thanks. :cool:
 
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