Real science proceeds from the best available evidence. Take the theory of cometary formation, for example. Before the Stardust mission returned samples from Comet Wild 2, scientists didn't have access to any direct physical evidence of cometary composition, so they therefore were forced to rely on far less direct evidence and computer models. But what has happened to their long cherished theories after getting actual physical evidence from just one comet?

NASA's Stardust Findings May Alter View of Comet Formation ( http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/status/0... )

Now compare actual science to what NIST did when they "explained" the WTC collapses. NIST's only report that discusses the hard physical evidence of the WTC towers' collapses ( http://wtc.nist.gov/NISTNCSTAR1-3.pdf ) admits that:

1) no WTC-7 steel was recovered or analyzed,

2) no testing for explosives (or sulfidation or other residue of any kind) was performed by NIST and the only metal tested extensively by metallurgists (by FEMA) revealed strange signs of sulfidation of unknown origin,

3) only 12 total core columns were carefully analyzed for high temperature exposure from WTC-1, WTC-2 & WTC-7 combined and none showed exposure to temperatures in excess of 250 C, and

4) of 170 examined areas on the perimeter column panels, only three showed exposure to temperatures in excess of 250 C (and for one of these three forensic evidence indicated that the high temperature exposure occurred AFTER the collapse).

NIST had (or should have had) access to all the physical evidence any scientist could ever hope for just sitting on the ground in Manhattan waiting to be analyzed. But instead of carefully examining this potential goldmine of actual physical structural collapse data, NIST chose to look at just 0.25% of it even cursorily. And of the 0.25% NIST examined, about one percent of this tiny fraction (that's less than 1/40,000 of the total collapsed WTC metal) showed any signs of being heated in excess of 250 C for any period longer than fleeting seconds.

Meanwhile, NIST invented a bunch of speculative and physically unsupported theories about how the towers fell that required significant portions of the WTC towers' steel structure to be heated for significant periods of time well in excess of what even the most heated physical evidence they examined actually demonstrated. Basically, NIST ignored their best evidence -- the actual physical remains of the collapsed towers -- in favor of a bunch of comparatively pseudoscientific postulation.

Now compare what these NIST "scientists" did to what NASA's real scientists are doing in the case of cometary formation. It's as if NASA scientists randomly sampled 2000 different comets -- 99% of which showed signs of being formed close to the sun -- yet still clung to their old unsupported computer models that basically POSTULATED that the vast majority comets were formed in the outer reaches of the solar system.

In summary, everything NIST concluded about the collapse of the WTC towers is contradicted by the best available evidence, and nothing they concluded is supported by even a shred of hard, physical evidence. Facing such a dilemma, any real scientists would have had only three choices: revise their speculative theories to match the small portion of retrieved and analyzed physical evidence, extend their survey of the relevant physical evidence until they found at least some hard, physical support for their speculations, or admit their complete ignorance of the WTC collapse phenomena while advocating much more rigorous additional future research. Instead, NIST simply dismissed the best available scientific evidence in favor of complicated speculative models which they fed a bunch of physically unsupported guesstimates that, at best, cannot be disproven (simply because they didn't survey enough physical evidence to disprove them).

Sound familiar, global warming advocates?