On September 11, 2001, as part of a planned terrorist attack, commercial planes were hijacked and flown into each of the two towers at the World Trade Center in New York. A third plane was flown into the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed after the passengers fought back. This, of course, was a huge world-affecting event. It is predictable that after such events, conspiracy theorists will come out of the woodwork and begin their anomaly hunting, breathing in the chaos that inevitably follows such events and spinning their sinister tales, largely out of their warped imagination. It is also not surprising that the theories that result, just like any pseudoscience, never truly die. They may fade to the fringe, but will not go away completely, waiting for a new generation to bamboozle. In the age of social media, everything also has a second and third life as a You Tube or Tik Tok video.

But still I found it interesting, after not hearing 911 conspiracy theories for years, to get an e-mail out of the blue promoting the same-old 911 conspiracy that the WTC towers fell due to planned demolition, not the impact of the commercial jets. The e-mail pointed to this recent video, by dedicated conspiracy theorist Jonathan Cole. The video has absolutely nothing new to say, but just recycles the same debunked line of argument.

The main idea is that experts and engineers cannot fully explain the sequence of events that led to the collapse of the towers and also explain exactly how the towers fell as they did. To do this Cole uses the standard conspiracy theory playbook – look for anomalies and then insert your preferred conspiracy theory into the apparent gap in knowledge that you open up. The unstated major premise of this argument is that experts should be able to explain, to an arbitrary level of detail, exactly how a complex, unique, and one-off event unfolded – and they should be able to do this from whatever evidence happens to be available.

The definitive official report on the cause of the collapse of the two towers is in the NIST report, which concludes:

“In WTC 1 , the fires weakened the core columns and caused the floors on the south side of the building to sag. The floors pulled the heated south perimeter columns inward, reducing their capacity to support the building above. Their neighboring columns quickly became overloaded as columns on the south wall buckled. The top section of the building tilted to the south and began its descent. The time from aircraft impact to collapse initiation was largely determined by how long it took for the fires to weaken the building core and to reach the south side of the building and weaken the perimeter columns and floors.”

The process in WTC 2 was similar, just with different details. Essentially the impact of the commercial jets dislodged the fireproofing from the core columns. The subsequent fires then heated up and weakened the steel, reducing their ability to bear load until they ultimately failed, initiating collapse. Once a collapse was initiated the extra load of the falling floors was greater than the ability of the lower floors to bear, so they also collapsed.

There really is no mystery here – a careful and thorough analysis by many experts using all available video evidence, engineering designs of the building, and computer simulations have provided an adequate and highly plausible explanation. But Cole believes you can just look at the videos and contradict the experts – he explicitly argues for this position, even that it is “obvious” what is happening and all the experts are wrong. He then cherry picks reasons for not accepting the expert conclusion, such as, why haven’t we seen this before? Where are the pancaked floors? But again, he is just anomaly hunting. What he fails to consider is that the WTC towers were the largest structures ever to collapse in this way, and that you cannot simply scale up smaller building collapses and think you can understand or predict what should have happened with the towers. The energies involved are different, and therefore the relevant physics will behave differently. This is like trying to understand what will happen if a person falls from a height by your experience with small insects falling from relatively similar heights.

The two main anomalies he focuses on are the absence of recognizable debris and the apparent “explosions”. He says – where are the pancaked floors? Meanwhile, lower Manhattan was covered with a layer of concrete dust. Where do you think that dust came from? Again – at this scale and these energies the concrete was mostly pulverized into powder. This is not a mystery.

His second line of evidence (again, nothing new) is the apparent series of explosions ahead of the collapse. However, these explosions are simply the air pressure and immense power of the building collapsing down, causing an explosive sound as each floor was encountered by the collapse, and causing air to be blown out the windows. This is not an incredibly precise sequence of explosions ahead of the collapse – it is the collapse. I love how the “controlled demolition” advocates argue that the collapse looked like such a demolition. But actually look at videos of controlled demolitions – they look nothing like the collapse of the towers. In such cases you see the explosions, usually happening at roughly the same time, a moment before the collapse. The sequence is – explosions then collapse. But with the WTC collapses the collapse comes first, and the apparent “explosions” (which do not look like any demolition video I have seen) are at the leading edge of the collapse. This would requires a fantastically timed sequence of demolitions that is virtually impossible.

In essence Cole and other die-hard 911 conspiracy theorists are replacing a well modeled and evidenced explanation for the collapse with wild speculation, causing far more problems than the imaginary ones they conjure up.

There is also the fact that conspiracy theorists rarely provide any positive evidence for their conspiracy. They only try to poke holes in the official explanation, then insert a sinister interpretation. But here we are, 23 years later, and still there isn’t a lick of evidence (even through multiple subsequent administrations) for a conspiracy. The conspiracy narrative also doesn’t make sense. Why would they arrange to have commercial jets laden with fuel crash into the towers, and then also take on the risk of rigging them for controlled demolition, and then setting off the demolition in front of the world and countless cameras? And then take the risk that an official investigation, even in a later administration, would not reveal the truth. This is a bad movie plot, one that would pull me from my sustained disbelief.

There is no evidence for an inside job. There is no evidence that a massive project to plant explosives in both towers (or three, if you include WTC7) had occurred. There is no evidence from actual expert analysis that the towers fell due to controlled demolition. Cole’s analysis is not convincing to say the least. I find it childish and simplistic. But it is easy to use anomaly hunting to create the impression that something fishy is going on, and that is partly why these conspiracy theories persists, long past their expiration date.