"NIST'S 10,000-page report purports to explain what it calls "collapse initiation" -- the loss of several floors' vertical support," writes Kevin Barrett of Scholars for 9/11 Truth. "In order to dream up this preposterous scenario, NIST had to ignore its own tests that showed that virtually none of the steel got hotter than 500 degrees f. It had to claim that somehow the planes took out many core columns, despite the fact that only a direct hit by an engine would have been likely to do so, and that the chances of this happening even once are fairly low. It had to preposterously allege that the plane that nicked the corner of the South Tower took out more core columns than the one that hit the North Tower almost dead center. It had to tweak all the parameters till they screamed bloody murder and say that the steel was far weaker than it actually was, the fire was far hotter than it actually was, the sagging was far greater than it actually was, and so on. And so NIST hallucinated a computer-generated fantasy scenario for "collapse initiation"--the failure of a few floors."

"But how do you get from the failure of a few floors to total collapse at free-fall speed of the entire structure? The short answer: You don't. Anyone with the slightest grasp of the laws of physics understands that even if all of the vertical supports on a few floors somehow failed catastrophically at exactly the same moment--a virtually impossible event, but one necessary to explain why the Towers would come straight down rather than toppling sideways--the top part of the building could not fall THROUGH the still-intact, highly robust lower part of the building, straight through the path of most resistance, just as fast as it would have fallen through thin air."

"Thus total free-fall collapse, even given NIST's ridiculous "initiation" scenario, is utterly impossible. The probability of it happening is exactly equal to the probability of the whole building suddenly falling upward and landing on the moon," concludes Barrett.