I use it only for the convenience of my audience. And it makes me great fun at parties. I always had a ready conspiracy with which to regale respectable types over cocktails.
But I suppose there is a time to be serious. I will explain to you that I use "conspiracy theory" as shorthand for a breed of conceptual model of interpreting data. A conceptual model is a framework into which data are plugged.
.
I used to work as a telecommunications technician, first in the Navy, and then as a "cable man." I worked exclusively on commercial installations in hotels. I was very good at it. As a result, I rarely had to do anything. My bosses were happy to have me on the payroll just so that I could be called upon to fix the occasional unfixable problem.
My professional realm was a dark room with bank upon bank of electronic equipment, each vying for my attention with plaintive beeps and come-hither flashing lights. It might be easy to become distracted...
I would be called to the scene only after other technicians had successfully frittered away the day chasing their tails, pursuing leads that went nowhere.
My fellow technicians regarded me as insane. I always talked crazy talk: Electrostatic discharge, inversion layers, ground loops, standing waves. These are all the bugaboos of the deranged mind, you know. Kookie talk. To contemplate such unfashionable things requires a level of commitment to understanding that most lack.
You may be familiar with the F connector. It is the connector on the end of a television cable. You've seen it.
This connector was designed by some RF engineer some decades ago. RF means "radio frequency." RF engineering is a bit of a black art. Most people have no idea how energy propagates, their convictions to the contrary notwithstanding.
The RF engineer who designed the connector decreed that it shall be tightened to its mating jack to a torque of seven foot-pounds. And trust me, when the engineer says seven foot-pounds, that's what he means. If you were to hang a bag and a half of sugar from a horizontal rod one foot in length... and attach the other end around the F connector... this force would exert a tightening torque of about seven foot-pounds.
Seven foot-pounds does not mean finger tight. Some people just don't believe this.
I would walk into another technician's site and half-listen to him as he breathlessly explained how he had done everything and what he suspected and what he had for lunch that day and what space aliens he thought were conspiring to cause his system to malfunction. I would take a quick look around and grab cables and take note of indicators.
"In my cursory examination of your system, I count no less than thirty-five loose connectors, four improperly constructed cables, one missing SCSI terminator, and a backwards tap. That your system functions at all is a bit of a minor miracle. It is operating quite accidently. Your salvation lies in not half-assing things."
Armed with my prescription for success, he would go on to fix his system. It took me fifteen minutes to solve a problem that had vexed an army of technicians for a week. So I'd go have a long lunch and then roam around Manhattan looking beautiful and brooding.
My job is to diagnose systems. I am very good at it. And I know this. A confident assessment of one's own skills make one a potent fixing machine.
And by the way, the reason why that crazy old RF engineer specified that the F connector shall be tightened to seven foot-pounds is because he understood semiconductors. You see, when you fail to tighten a connector properly it conducts sometimes... and sometimes not. It pretty much conducts when it feels like it. This is not a...desired state of affairs. When you pass energy through a semiconductor where you expect to find a conductor, all sorts of bad things happen: Frequency shifting, forward and reverse noise, resonant waves.
But that's just kookie talk...
.
Part of diagnosing a system failure is to take an oral account from those who witnessed the system prior to --and at the time of-- that system's failure.
As witnesses recounted to me their recollection of events, I would answer in my mind one or more of the following: "That didn't happen," "that's interesting," "that's maybe significant," "that's vital to know," or "this person has no idea what he's talking about."
Step one is to take the oral history and compare it to what I see.
"Yeah, see, on Friday night the system just stopped working! I think it's your problem, as usual. Your system never works."
"Perhaps... But in this utility closet I detect fresh drywall dust. [swipe of finger] Has there been any construction recently?"
"Sure! We had our guys fix a broken pipe in the wall. They had to cut a hole over here...and they...oh, by the way...they might have had to disconnect those cables over there..."
"...And they replaced them in the wrong positions..."
Or I might ask of a functionary at the hotel, "What time did the system fail? Was it at midnight or at noon?" He might detect where I was going with this line of questioning. "At noon! I remember it like it was yesterday."
"Well, you see, that's not theoretically possible. The system enters a watchdog mode from eleven-fifty-five to twelve-oh-five, while it refreshes all network connections. Such a thing could not be true. Moreover, the connection log indicates that it lost communication with your charge-accounting system at 11:59 pm. This indicates to me that the reason why you lost some fifteen hundred dollars in movie postings is because your Property Management System computer had not cached those charges prior to its end-of-day reconciliation. I told you this might happen. So not only will I not reimburse you for the lost revenue, I shall now present you with a bill for my time. Please have a nice day. And implement the changes I recommended to you six months ago."
I don't believe anything anyone says. And it's not because I am congenitally suspicious; it's just that I don't want to chase my tail all day.
.
When contemplating 9-11, the conspiracy theorist --in my fun, cocktail party definition of the term-- does not lounge around concocting ever more entertaining scenarios. "It would be so cool if it was the space aliens! Yeah, and they used...negato-graviton dust to suspend time! How do I cobble together the pieces to support such a theory?!"
It's really much more boring than that.
1. What do people claim happened?
2. What are the observables?
There are a number of problems with the functionary's account of events...
And since I wish to leave work early and roam around Manhattan looking beautiful and brooding, I will avoid going down every proffered rabbit hole and instead focus on the linchpins of the functionary's account of events:
WTC 1 and 2 blowed up and fell right down.
The official explanation is that a jet flew into the building, caught fire, and the weakened steel caused one floor to collapse upon another, all the way down. This is called the pancake theory.
I am no statistician. I do not know at which point the outlandishly improbable becomes theoretically impossible. I prefer the more dramatic-sounding "theoretically impossible."
It is not theoretically possible for a jet to cause the collapse of the building for two, and perhaps, more, reasons:
1. There was an energy deficit. (I will warn you that this is kookie talk.)
2. A pancake collapse would have taken more than the allotted time. (This is also kookie talk.)
Regarding the first: In short, the thermal energy from the burning jet fuel and the combustion of building contents... plus the kinetic energy of the plane... was insufficient to collapse the building. I will refer you to competent physicists for the calculations. It's pretty basic, really. If I wanted to, I could leave work right now. But let's go one further...
On the pancake theory: This is the most cockamamie idea I have ever heard. This enters the realm of the space aliens.
The notion is that the weakend steel caused one floor to collapse. Boom! it strikes the floor below. Boom! That floor strikes the one below. Boom! And on and on down the line. It takes some non-zero amount of time --a component of the "impulse"-- for this energy to be transferred. Over some one hundred floors or whatever, you can see that it would add up to something significant.
The towers collapsed at near free-fall speeds, nowhere near the speed of the hypothetical pancake collapse. I don't know how long a pancake collapse would take --something on the order of minutes, not seconds, I suspect. Again, consult your neighborhood physicist...
.
So...
Since I have now proven to you that the proffered scenario is not theoretically possible, where do we go from here? What remains --as the man said-- however improbable, is the truth. Unless you prefer to entertain yourselves with satisfying tales of space aliens...
Obviously: To correct the energy deficit requires the inputting of additional energy. How dastardly and nefarious persons might have secreted this additional energy into the buildings is not relevant. Where there is a will there is a way. (Not to mention that Neil* Bush sat on the board of directors of the company in charge of security at the WTC. I find this...interesting...)
So, New York Times... So, Village Voice... Regardless of your affinity for outlandish theories involving space aliens, that's not how it happened. My three-dollar calculator says so.
.
I do not dismiss your grief. I'm sorry you lost friends.
So you will not begrudge me the ferocity with which I avenge them.
You will contribute to their avenging or you will remain silent. That is the relationship here.
-------
*Postscript 9/19/06: It was Marvin Bush. My bad. Same thing, though.
