For the better part of a year, one of the most powerful teaching tools for 9/11 Truth -- the Billiard Ball Example (BBE) developed by ST911 Member Prof. Judy Wood -- has been tangled in controversy. What appears below started out as an informal e-mail to one individual on the ST911 forum. After drafting the e-mail, it occurred to me that the information presented might be useful to a wider audience. Because I have had a unique vantage point from which to observe the issue, it seemed appropriate to provide that perspective to others who may have been confused by the continual attacks against the BBE. I thus re-worked the e-mail and added an extra section or two to fill out the piece; the conversational tone, however, has been retained.

The information provided is organized around the following topics:

Just so you'll know who’s talking, here's my educational/experiential background:

 
Graduated from an elite private high school in Atlanta, GA, 1965
(My family was not 'elite', but sacrificed to have me there.)

Graduated from University of Texas at Austin, 1971, summa cum laude
Major: classical languages; minor: music (flute)

Graduated with an MBA from the University of Georgia, 1984
Area of concentration: management science

When I was a parent, my children ended up in a Montessori school, which prompted me to become intensely interested in the cognitive development of children. By a circuitous path I chanced upon a sophisticated mathematical model of the structure of modern base number; and for 15 years I explored the use of it, which allowed for the teaching of what many consider to be advanced mathematics to very young children.

I was married for 20 years to a social anthropologist. I have three grown children, one of whom was born in Mexico when we lived there while my husband was doing research for his Ph.D.

I have a very STRONG interest in seeing the Billiard Ball Example freed up to do the task of educating Americans to see the truth of the WTC tower demolitions.

It's the central reason I'm a member of ST911.
 
 

There are people floating around who seem to have the principal assignment of eviscerating the effectiveness of the Billiard Ball Example. Why would they do that? In my opinion, the 'bad guys' recognize the power of the BBE to open people's eyes and wake them up. So naturally, they want to deep-six it.

Both inside and outside ST911, there have been outright gross attacks against Prof. Wood, but there's been subtle stuff, as well, which has really (and outrageously) undermined her credibility. For the longest time, we thought the problem was sexism. (That is, at some level the idea of a woman knowing more about engineering than men is being taken as an offense to the male chauvinist sensibility.) I do think sexism plays its part here, but other factors have been in the mix, as well: arrogant egos, jealousy -- and psy-ops, for sure.

In other words, a debilitating toxic stew.

I'm very bad at playing games and am much more inclined to name what I see. So I'm laying out -- flat out -- my perspective on the situation.

Please don't think I'm intending for you to take my word at face value on any of this. After you hear what I have to say, I invite you to start watching and thinking on your own; you'll figure it out.
 
 

I met Prof. Wood over a year ago at a conference on electronic voting in Nashville, Tennessee. Our connection was my bumper sticker: "9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB; OUR NATION IS IN PERIL". She was very impressed that I had such a statement on my car. Teaching in Clemson, S.C., she was stunned that I was publicly announcing a fascination of hers in which (at the time) she could only imagine indulging in secret.

Anyway, some months later, she contacted me and we began to develop an Internet friendship based on our mutual interest in 9/11 Truth.

Last September we traveled together to Washington, D.C., to attend Cynthia McKinney's 9/11 hearings. Afterwards, we joined a group who had come down from New York, and went with them to dinner in Chinatown. Walking down the street that evening, she explained her billiard ball idea to me.

A light went on. It was a lovely experience.

I knew in that moment the Billiard Ball Example was something special.

It was uniquely -- serendipitously -- designed to wake people up.

I do want you to suspend disbelief and trust me on something for the moment.

The BBE is absolutely solid!

If you'll open yourself up to the possibility, I'm completely confident you'll be able to see it. (You do have to get away from the idea that Prof. Wood is trying to 'prove' how the WTC towers came down or 'prove' how much time it actually took; that's not the purpose at all, and people have either ignorantly or willfully not understood that.)

If you haven't done so already, I suggest you go to Prof. Wood's website and read through the Billiard Ball Example:

http://janedoe0911.tripod.com/BilliardBalls.html
 
 

How can I be so sure you'll see the validity of the Billiard Ball Example (that is, in its own terms)?

Well, in a number of ways.

(1) First, I want you to consider Prof. Wood's background.

She has an undergraduate degree in civil engineering and graduate degrees centered in engineering mechanics -- i.e., unlike her critics, she has the EXACT expertise suited to analyzing the WTC demolitions -- AND she's one helluva smart engineer.

I don't think there's anybody else in ST911 who comes close to having her level of expertise for addressing the problem at hand. (Prof. Steven Jones comes the closest; but considering she IS an engineer, if my life depended upon the correct solution to a knotty engineering problem, I'd give it to Prof. Wood.)

One of the things that has driven me WILD is to have to sit back and watch her work being attacked by people who feign expertise but show no evidence of it.

Not to mention the intelligence operatives.

(2) The second reason I believe in Prof. Wood's work is that she's a damned good teacher. Over the course of nearly ten months now, the rationale behind the Billiard Ball Example -- the logic of it -- has come up on numerous occasions between us. Because I'm a very non-technical person, teaching me has probably not been the easiest assignment Prof. Wood ever had; but she's been very patient and persistent with me.

Most prominently, we traveled together this past June to the Society of Experimental Mechanics (SEM) Conference in St. Louis, where she presented her work on the tower demolitions. On the drive back, over two or three hours, I had the opportunity to get a private tutorial, in the form of a question and answer session, from Prof. Wood on a panoply of issues relating to the BBE. By the end of it, we’d worked through the basic science behind the creation of the BBE in terms I could understand, as well as all the spurious ways it has been attacked -- and WHY those attacks have been spurious -- so that the whole issue has now become quite clear to me.

The arguments leveled against the BBE are simply unjustified! They're outright distortions of basic science. People either don't really understand the mechanics involved, or they're deliberately distorting the issue.

(3) A third way I'm convinced Prof. Wood's BBE is sound comes from seeing first-hand the reaction to it of other, very seasoned engineers.

At the SEM conference, I had the privilege not only of meeting Prof. Wood's major professor, Dr. Dan Post, but of seeing who this man actually was. One evening, there was a 'family gathering' of the intellectual clan descended from her mentor's mentor, Dr. Chuck Taylor -- one of the founding members of SEM. (That clan calls themselves "the Taylor series". ;-)) )

These folks struck me as the best of the best -- people of great humanity and great intellectual integrity. I was able to observe Prof. Wood in this milieu, and we talked directly with Dr. Post about the matter of 9/11 (he had seen the BBE some months before). The issue certainly disturbed him, but with his background, the implications of the BBE were indisputable.

At one point Dr. Post offered an excellent piece of advice about the approach Prof. Wood might take in her presentation: "Play down the strong facts," he said. "Otherwise, you’ll risk scaring off your audience." So that’s what she did. She presented evidence of the way the towers were constructed, gave the analysis of her Billiard Ball Example, and showed videos of the tower "collapses". She didn’t allow herself to be ‘baited’: audience members were left to draw their own conclusions.

Another direct interaction I saw occurred immediately after her presentation and was between Prof. Wood and a forensic engineer of many years’ experience (also a former engineering department chair of a major Midwestern university). His comment? Something like this: "You've clearly shown there's a lower limit to how long it would take those towers to come down, and the official story is well below that limit." I could see as he spoke that the implications troubled him; he didn't want to go there! But as a veteran engineer, he couldn't in honesty see a way around what Prof. Wood's BBE established. For him, an issue is now out in the open which, sooner or later, he will have to confront.

If there were a fundamental flaw in the logic of the Billiard Ball Example, don't you think one of these two men, especially -- who've known Prof. Wood over the years and care about her, as well as about getting things right -- would have pointed out the problem?

My question to you: Are you prepared to argue against the considerable expertise of Prof. Wood -- not to mention the opinions of the likes of these two distinguished engineering professors?

I'm not.

(4) But there's yet a fourth way I'm convinced of the truth of Prof. Wood's work.

At my core, I'm a teacher. As I explained in one of my posts on the ST911 forum, I know at the most visceral level that successfully reducing a problem to its absolute simplicity can only be done by a master.

The most recent attacks against Prof. Wood's work have entered the theater of the absurd, including the implication that simplicity is a sign of weakness.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

I was also a classically trained pianist. Shuman's "Traumerei" is not a technically difficult piece of music, and it's one of the most famous little pieces of all.

Yet who plays it well?

Only the masters.

Simplicity, in fact, is the purview of masters.

In attacking the Billiard Ball Example, one individual went so far as to pronounce it trivial to the point that it didn't involve engineering mechanics at all!

Unbelievable!!

You spend several hours with Prof. Wood talking through the issue, and you're going to find that there's a life-time of experience behind the simplicity of this thought experiment. There's nothing trivial about it.

Because of my own background, I understand how that works, and I recognize it when I see it.

(One example from my own life: When I had a five-year-old use her finger to trace the edge of a block representing a number so that she could understand the idea of a ‘factor’, that act was not ‘trivial’, but profound. The child didn’t need to know all the thinking that had gone into making that act my teaching tool; but it was there.)
 
 

With respect to the simplicity of the BBE, we need to understand what it’s designed to address. The Official Conspiracy Theory (OCT), as it was originally concocted, made the claim that the WTC towers were brought down by ‘pancaking’ -- i.e., one floor falling on another in a domino effect -- in 10 seconds. (BTW -- the promoters of the OCT (OCTers) seem to have decided they don’t like the term ‘pancaking’ anymore; so they’ve started using the more mumbo-jumbo phrase, ‘progressive collapse’. But if the only force you have to work with in your explanation is gravity, this amounts to the same thing.)

What Prof. Wood does is take the OCT claim at face value. She says, in essence, "O.K. The OCTers say ‘pancaking in 10 seconds by gravity alone’. Let’s check this out. If we apply the known Law of Gravity to the situation of the towers on 9/11, can we reproduce ‘collapse by pancaking’ in 10 seconds?"

Just so you’ll know, the OCTers have also started wanting to change their story in another way -- to a fall-time of 15 seconds rather than the 10 seconds reported in the 9/11 Commission Report.

As if this would make a difference!

It makes no difference at all. Their story is still IMPOSSIBLE, no matter how they try to jerry-rig it!!

In an important sense, Prof. Wood’s model is counter to reality. In reality, the towers COULDN’T have been brought down by gravity alone under the circumstances present on 9/11. (With her Billiard Ball Example, Prof. Wood just PRETENDS it could happen so as to figure out now long it would take if it HAD happened (by gravity alone)!)

However, there's one critical factor in her analysis that IS related to what we all saw on 9/11 -- i.e., there was no actual 'pancaking' in the ordinary way we might think that term would imply (i.e., 110 floors piling one on top of another) -- but rather PULVERIZATION of the floors as the buildings came down (that is, the floors turned to DUST and thus had no further impact on what was happening below).

Otherwise, the whole focus of the BBE is on TIMING, given Newton's Law of Gravity -- not the ACTUAL collapse time -- whatever number of seconds anyone wants to claim -- but simply the time it WOULD take, if there were no impediments at all, with all the floors successively set in motion by being struck from above -- and successively turning to dust as part of that process. To repeat, the question the Billiard Ball Example addresses is this: If that happened (and the upper floors kept turning to dust), how long would it take for the 110 floors to all get down to the ground?

ANSWER: TOO LONG FOR THE OFFICIAL STORY TO BE TRUE!!

THAT'S the point.

The BBE is not designed to identify exactly HOW the towers came down. It's PURPOSE is purely to serve as a simple thought experiment to address the question above.

It's not a dissertation aimed at the scientific community; it's an educational tool tailored for the general public!

A WAKE-UP tool!

What I want to know is: WHY are so many people -- presumably dedicated to 9/11 truth -- fighting so hard against it?

If there are people out there intent upon making nonsensical assaults on the Billiard Ball Example, the appropriate response is to get our group up to speed on how to counter those assaults -- not kill the BBE! That's what the OCT supporters WANT us to do.

Do you know why I’m pulling my hair out?

We could have been supporting the dissemination of the BBE back in February. Instead -- how many months now have certain individuals associated with ST911 (along with others) been trashing it? And how long must it take to un-trash it?
 
 

With respect to what ST911 might usefully be doing, there are of course multiple possible productive avenues. In my (and Prof. Wood's) view, we need a cornucopia of different methods of disproving the Official Conspiracy Theory, though the greatest number of them need to be designed for the consumption of regular folks -- WITHOUT being condescending to their intelligence. The BBE is, well, an 'example' -- one clever way of demonstrating the basic wake-up idea that the OCT CANNOT be true.

Whatever tasks might be important, I'm clear in my mind that the FIRST order of business is to WAKE UP Americans. It's like the nation is drugged; or perhaps more aptly, it's like the terror of 9/11 put us in a powerful hypnotic trance. This ‘terror trance’ includes the unexamined assumptions that (1) we NEED our government for protection; (2) therefore, our government MUST be trustworthy; (3) therefore, its Official Conspiracy Theory MUST be true.

In my opinion, the Billiard Ball Example has this wonderful property of getting people to 'snap out of it'. A number of factors go into this effect.

First, it's non-threatening; we're not focusing on the horror of the towers coming down and people dying awful deaths; we're just thinking about billiard balls dropping. Secondly, the only principle of physics we have to understand is the Law of Gravity. Almost anybody who's been through high school or watched Nova knows that an object speeds up as it falls, and that there's a formula to calculate the fall time. But the fact that we're going to actually APPLY this physical principle -- i.e., go through a little mental exercise -- to gain our own understanding of the matter is very empowering.

The core of the idea is simplicity itself:

There's this huge 'stack' of floors, and what gets them moving, one by one, from zero velocity is that they're struck from above. There's this chain reaction, and the minimum time in which it can occur is DEFINED by Newton's irrefutable Law of Gravity.

We can all see that.

The LIGHT goes on!! That story the government's been telling us CAN'T be true!!

And the spell is broken.

Awakened people are placed in a position to begin to consider other possibilities on their own. And nobody TOLD them what the truth was; they were able to SEE IT FOR THEMSELVES!

That's key.

NOW -- probably the most common line of attack against the BBE is people saying, "Oh, but ‘Judy’ (Prof. Wood) is so stupid, she didn't even consider conservation of momentum! If she had, she would see that the building is actually going to come down much faster than that; so that totally discredits her -- and will discredit anyone who uses the BBE. It'll be a disaster for 9/11 Truth!"

Nope.

What people don't realize (though I think the OCT ops do) is the depth of scientific understanding that's hidden from view. Far from having 'forgotten' conservation of momentum, Prof. Wood has complete mastery of the issues involving momentum as they apply to the analysis of the WTC "collapses". They're ACCOUNTED FOR in the way she's set up her thought experiment.
 

As Prof. Wood states: 

See here for a more complete explanation. 
 
 

People who either don’t understand or actively want to delude others claim there’s MOMENTUM to spare that can SPEED UP the rate of fall of the floors. But guess what? Any momentum that MIGHT be available gets USED UP in turning the floors to dust (THAT’S the REALITY everyone can SEE)!

And while I’m at it, I’d like to point out another incorrect thing the attackers are doing. They’re acting as if, when anyone uses billiard balls in an example, that somehow suggests the balls have to strike each other as in a game of billiards and thus take on the properties of that situation! (Just yesterday I saw this posted pictorially somewhere on the Web, along with roundly insulting comments about Prof. Wood’s intelligence.) I hope you are as appalled by the ridiculousness (or deceitfulness ??) of this tactic as I am.

Prof. Wood is an experimentalist! Her CRAFT is understanding mechanics problems so that she can make informed decisions about what assumptions are reasonable under a given set of circumstances.

Why would ANY sensible person listen to the RIDICULOUS ‘criticisms’ made by uninformed -- more likely disinfo -- people intent upon attacking Prof. Wood’s analysis?
 
 

Though the basic idea is older than this, Prof. Wood first posted her Billiard Ball Example on the Web on July 21, 2005 (on a Democratic Underground forum -- see here). I learned about the BBE on September 23, 2005. For most of the time since then, I’ve been following reactions to it on various forums on the Internet. I must say, the intensely energetic efforts to defame it -- which seem to have gone into especially high gear of late -- are truly remarkable to observe. While defenders of the BBE are usually around, so far there’s been a tendency for them to be shouted down in one way or another.

Having rhetorically asked the question, ‘Why?’, I’d like now to give my own considered opinion.

Here’s the great danger of the BBE from the position of the OCTers:

THE BILLARD BALL EXAMPLE PUTS THE GATEKEEPERS OUT OF BUSINESS!
 

To keep a Big Lie going, you’ve got to be able to control what people are thinking. How can you do that? Well, repeating the Big Lie loudly and incessantly is of course very important. But another critical factor is making sure the people you want to stay deluded are NEVER able to think through the issue FOR THEMSELVES.

As long as the Big Lie remains shrouded in ‘expertise’, forcing ordinary citizens to choose between gatekeepers, the Big Lie is safe. Thus, complex scientific analyses are not really a threat to the OCT, no matter how excellent. Why? Because regular folks are not in a position to evaluate the information themselves. ("Who’s telling the truth? Our government’s experts? The experts of the ‘conspiracy theorists’? Who’s to say?")

The REAL bottom line is that people dependent upon a knowledge base actively managed by others are rendered passive and disempowered.

So the GREATEST THREAT of the Billiard Ball Example to the Big Lie of the Official Conspiracy Theory is not that it educates, but that it removes the impediment to PEOPLE EMPOWERMENT!

Citizens connected to their own thought processes and reaching their own conclusions together form a citizenry EMPOWERED TO ACT!!

THAT’S the danger of the BBE.

THAT’S why there has been such an all-out effort to kill it.
 
 

I’m not the only person who sees these things. Some folks are coming forward to offer their own validations of the Billiard Ball Example with respect to how scientifically solid it is. Others are sharing wonderful stories about how the BBE has affected them and their thinking. Still others are reporting excitedly how they are planning to use the BBE to educate people in their community.

As you hear more of these reports, I anticipate you will become as confident as I am about spreading the Billiard Ball Example far and wide.

We can do this!!

Ginny Howard
Associate Member, ST911