A Word on Interpretation
It has been said that the world is one continuous Rorschach inkblot test: we see what we expect to see based on our fears and desires. All sides of the World Trade Centre (WTC) collapse issue can see definitive corroboration in the same photos and videos, the same laboratory tests and the same reports. In this way, both authors of this paper initially accepted the official explanation for the collapse of the buildings, as set out in the technical report of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), but they now undeniably approach the report from a skeptical perspective.
The NIST Report is not a special case in which logic and rationality do not or should not apply. Given proper resources for investigation, there can be nothing mythical or unexplainable about the collapse of the towers. If the accumulated explanation falls short of making sense, it should give anyone—regardless of ideological leanings—a reason to be suspicious and a cause to look more deeply into what happened that day. The official explanation should be a testable theory outlining a sequence of events. It should be able to explain the physical evidence and should not dismiss incongruous empirical data as irrelevant. On this, we can all agree.
