



Americans wondering why the government spent only $600,000 investigating the collapse of three WTC buildings on 9/11 (compared to $6 million investigating President Clinton's high jinks) got their answer today.

The science of 9/11 was just not that complicated. It was "liquids and gels" all the way down.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) in cooperation with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced the winners of the National Ground Zero Pancake Blowout Competition yesterday. The Blowout contest proved the science behind the 9/11 Commission's Report about why the buildings collapsed into their own footprints at free-fall speed. And it didn't cost the government a red penny to conduct the necessary tests. The answers came straight from two teams of high school science guys and gals-one from Iowa and the other from Oklahoma.

The contest rules were explained by the Grand Marshall, Professor Thomas Eager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an engineer who originated the Pancake Theory. According to Dr. Eagar in his testimony to the 9/11 Commission and repeated verbatim in the contest rules, the contestants were tasked to model the tragic collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, in which "upper floors pancaked down onto lower floors, causing a domino effect that left each building in ruins within ten seconds."

Both winning teams produced neat piles of exploded and completely powdered pancake debris, drawing high praise from Dr. Eagar, and from science teachers all over the U.S. One observer hailed the event as a turning point for American science education. The experiments proved that science can indeed be used to explain past events, establishing causes and effects; science is clearly not limited merely to studying how to avoid, or prepare for, future disasters. This is a ground-breaking concept, according to Dr. Eagar-one he admitted had never occurred to him, personally, which explains why the concept is totally absent both from his own testimony and from the final Report of the 9/11 Commission.

All competing teams tried to model the collapse of WTC 1, 2 and 7 using pancakes to represent the steel-and-cement floors. To represent the steel infrastructure around the outside "wall" of each great pancake stack, the contestants placed long, thin bamboo sticks; and the inner core was modeled using 47 bamboo sticks leading from the "sub-basement" to the roof. The sticks, of course, served as pancake-separators, precisely modeling the functional office spaces between the floors in the three WTC buildings.

After carefully constructing their "tall stacks" according to specifications, contestants attempted to bring them down by igniting selected pancake "floors" with exploding jet fuel (kerosene) fires representing the points of contact where the hijacked airplanes entered the buildings at 500 miles per hour.

The 47-storey WTC Building 7 posed a special problem because it was never hit by an airplane on 9/11, yet it collapsed into its own footprint, too, and at free-fall speed; moreover, it collapsed from the "bottom up" unlike WTC 1 & 2, which collapsed from the "top down". As Dr. Eagar had explained patiently to the 9/11 Commission: WTC 7 is especially important. Not only did WTC 7 inspire the Pancake Theory in the first place, it demonstrated convincingly that any alternative theories must be rejected as mere "speculation". Accordingly, contestants were instructed to ignore the obviously different circumstances surrounding the collapse of WTC 7, and to bring down all three buildings in the exact same manner.

Two teams out of almost 300 contestants nationwide successfully demonstrated that a "tall stack" consisting of between 47 and 110 pancakes will always collapse on itself in a heap of dust when subjected to heat from kerosene fires positioned roughly 3/4 of the way up the stack.

What surprised most observers, the winning explosive mix of ingredients included whole wheat flour, buttermilk, soda (for leavening), and two "special ingredients" in place of cooking oil-to be discussed below. By contrast, pancakes made from fresh milk or sour milk cannot in principle blow something to smithereens; and buckwheat or rye flour flapjacks blow apart nicely but never collapse at free-fall speed into their own footprints. The day's biggest duds, however, were 'cakes leavened with baking powder, which packs less than half the explosive power of bicarbonate of soda.

The two special ingredients used in place of cooking oil were "liquids and gels" collected from an interesting source-airports, complements of the war against the terrorists. Under careful supervision by HAZMAT and TSA agents, the students mixed some confiscated "liquids and gels" together with the appropriate amounts of buttermilk, whole wheat flour, and bicarb soda. KA-BLAM!

The day's fiery climax was declared to be "a catastrophic success" by Dr. Christopher Musso, engineering marketing specialist and co-author, with Dr. Eagar, of the Pancake Theory. It was Musso who originally suggested the contest as a means of providing a government-friendly, low-cost, yet valid and reliable test of the hard science that informs the 9/11 Commission Report.