Noam Chomsky slaps down 9/11 truther: People spend an hour on the Internet and think they know physics

This story first appeared at Raw Story on November 25, 2013.

MIT professor Noam Chomsky doesn't know what happened to "Building 7" of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

But he is convinced that so-called "9/11 Truthers" don't have the answer.

During a lecture on "Policy and the Media Prism" at the University of Florida a few weeks ago, 9/11 truth activist Bob Tuskin said the mainstream media had covered up evidence that Building 7 imploded in a controlled demolition. Tuskin asked Chomsky if he was finally ready to "jump on board with" 9/11 conspiracy theories.

"You're right that there's a consensus among a miniscule number of architects and engineers," Chomsky replied. "They are not doing what scientists and engineers do when they think they’ve discovered something."

"What you do when you think you've discovered something is write articles in scientific journals, give talks at the professional societies, go to the civil engineering department at MIT or Florida or wherever you are, and present your results, then proceed to try to convince the national academies, the professional society of physicists and civil engineers, the departments of the major universities, convince them that you’ve discovered something."

"There happen to be a lot of people around who spend an hour on the Internet and think they know a lot physics, but it doesn’t work like that. There’s a reason there are graduate schools in these departments," he continued.

Chomsky dismissed the claim that scientists and engineers hadn't followed typical procedures because they felt intimidated by the government. He said publishing an article in an academic journal was virtually risk-free compared to other forms of political activism.

"There is just overwhelming evidence that the Bush administration wasn't involved," Chomsky added. "Very elementary evidence. You don't have to be a physicist to understand it. You just have to think for a minute."

He noted that the Bush administration blamed the 9/11 attacks on Saudi hijackers. If the U.S. government had staged the attacks as a pretense to invade Iraq, they could have just as easily blamed Iraqi hijackers and avoided the need to "concoct wild stories about weapons of mass destruction" as their justification.

Watch video, uploaded to YouTube by Bob Tuskin, below: