Dr. Farrer first became aware of the destruction of WTC 7 on 9/11 when he read a paper by Professor Steven Jones, first published in 2005, where he discusses the strange details and evidence surrounding that event, including evidence that iron or steel from the World Trade Center had been melted during the destruction.
This made no sense, given the official theory of what brought down the twin towers and WTC 7, since the temperature of office and jet fuel fires was at least 1000°F cooler than the melting point of iron. Farrer sought out Professor Jones to discuss this evidence further.
At the time, Dr. Farrer was an electron microscopist working on characterizing materials, and he offered to help Professor Jones with his research. When he was able to later study samples of steel beams from the towers which had “obviously gone through some melting,” his expertise was critical in the discovery of different phases in the metal samples, including the steel, iron oxide, iron sulfide, and iron silicate phases. He explains that various techniques such as X-ray analysis and diffraction were used to determine the “…structure of the phases along with the chemistry.”
As a result of his research, Dr. Farrer “…came to the conclusion that in order to create these phases, [the metal would] have to reach a minimum of about 1100° C.” The question then became how did the metal reach such high temperatures?
“Obviously the question of how do you get to 1100° C is significant because you don’t get to those temperatures with scattered office fires or even jet-fuel-fed office fires. You get to maybe half that temperature.”
In addition to pointing out that jet fuel burning in open air is unable to create these phases, Dr. Farrer goes on to address the theories proposed by those who claim that some of the physical evidence we see was created during the clean-up of Ground Zero after 9/11.
“You don’t get these phases with an oxyacetylene torch [used] to cut the steel. You don’t get these phases existing together the way that we found them.” According to Dr. Farrer, it would take a properly controlled scientific experiment to demonstrate that such a method could create these phases, and “so far nobody’s done that.”