Steven Earl Jones is an American physicist. For most of his career, Jones was known mainly for his work on muon-catalyzed fusion. In the fall of 2006, amid controversy surrounding his work on the collapse of the World Trade Center, he was relieved of his teaching duties and placed on paid leave from Brigham Young University. On October 20, 2006, he announced his retirement. He believes that the World Trade Center was destroyed by controlled demolition during the September 11 attacks. Jones earned his bachelor's degree in physics, magna cum laude, from Brigham Young University in 1973, and his Ph.D. in physics from Vanderbilt University in 1978. Jones conducted his Ph.D. research at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (from 1974 to 1977), and post-doctoral research at Cornell University and the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility.[1] Jones conducted research at the Idaho National Laboratory, in Arco, Idaho where, from 1979 to 1985, he was a senior engineering specialist. He was principal investigator for experimental muon-catalyzed fusion from 1982 to 1991 for the U.S. Department of Energy, Division of Advanced Energy Projects. From 1990 to 1993, Jones studied fusion in condensed matter physics and deuterium under U.S. Department of Energy and Electric Power Research Institute sponsorship. Jones also collaborated in experiments at other physics labs, including TRIUMF (Vancouver, British Columbia), KEK (Tsukuba, Japan), and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at Oxford University. Jones' interests also extend to archaeometry, solar energy,[2][3] and, like many professors at BYU, archaeology and the Book of Mormon.[4] For example, he has sought radiocarbon dating evidence of the existence of pre-Columbian horses in the Americas,[5] and has interpreted archaeological evidence from the ancient Mayans as supporting his faith's belief that Jesus Christ visited America.[6] In the mid-1980s, Jones and other BYU scientists worked on what he then referred to as Cold Nuclear Fusion in a Scientific American article, but is today known as muon-catalyzed fusion to avoid confusion. Muon-catalyzed fusion was a field of some interest in the 1980s, but its low energy output appears to be unavoidable (due to alpha-muon sticking losses). Jones led a research team that in 1986 achieved 150 fusions per muon (average), releasing over 2,600 MeV of fusion energy per muon, a record which still stands.[7] Around 1985 Jones then became interested in the anomalous concentration of helium-3 found in the gases escaping from volcanoes. He hypothesized that the high pressures in the Earth's interior might make fusion more likely, and began a series of experiments on what he referred to as piezofusion, or high-pressure fusion. In order to characterize the reactions, Jones designed and built a neutron counter able to accurately measure the tiny numbers of neutrons being produced in his experiments. The counter suggested a small amount of fusion was going on. Jones said the result suggested at least the possibility of fusion, though the process was unlikely to be useful as an energy source. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann (Pons and Fleischmann or P&F) started their work around the same time. Their work was brought to Jones' attention when they applied for research funding from the Department of Energy, after which the DOE passed their proposal along to Jones for peer review. Realizing their work was very similar, Jones and P&F agreed to release their papers to Nature on the same day, March 24, 1989. However, P&F announced their results at a press event the day before. Jones faxed his paper to Nature.[8] A New York Times article says that while peer reviewers were quite critical of Pons and Fleishchmann's research they did not apply such criticism to Jones' much more modest, theoretically supported findings. Although critics insisted that his results likely stemmed from experimental error,[9] most of the reviewing physicists indicated that he was a careful scientist. Later research and experiments supported the metallic cold fusion reports by Jones.[10] On September 22, 2005 Jones presented his views on the collapse of the World Trade Center towers and World Trade Center 7 at a BYU seminar attended by about 60 people. Pointing to the speed and symmetry of the collapses, the characteristics of dust jets, eyewitness reports of explosions down low in the buildings, partially vaporized beams, molten metal in the basements which was still red hot weeks after the event, and the notion that no modern high rise had ever collapsed from fire, Jones suggested that the evidence defies the mainstream collapse theory and favors explosive demolition, possibly by the use of thermite or nanothermite. He called for further scientific investigation to test the controlled demolition conspiracy theories and the release of all relevant data by the government.[11] Shortly after the seminar, Jones placed a paper "Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?" on the Physics department website. He subsequently defended the research twice more at BYU, also at Idaho State University, Utah Valley State College, University of Colorado at Boulder and University of Denver, the Utah Academy of Science, Sonoma State University, University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Texas at Austin. [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] On September 7, 2006, Jones removed his paper from BYU's website at the request of administrators and was placed on paid leave. [19] The university cited its concern about the "increasingly speculative and accusatory nature" of Jones' work and the concern that perhaps it had "not been published in appropriate scientific venues" as reasons for putting him under review. The review was to have been conducted at three levels: BYU administration, the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, and the Physics Department.[20] Jones' colleagues also defended Jones' 9/11 work to varying degrees,[21] and Project Censored lists his 9/11 research among the top mainstream media censored stories of 2007.[22] Jones' placement on paid leave drew criticism from the American Association of University Professors and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Both organizations are long time critics of BYU's record on academic freedom.[23] Jones "welcomed the review" because he hoped it would "encourage people to read his paper for themselves," however the review was abandoned (contrary to Jones' request) when Jones elected to retire, effective January 1, 2007.[24] Jones has been interviewed by mainstream news sources and has made a number of public appearances. While Jones has urged caution in drawing conclusions,[25] some believe that his public comments have suggested a considerable degree of certainty about both the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center and the culpability of elements within the U.S. government.[26] In one interview, he asserted that the attacks were "an 'inside job', puppeteered by the neoconservatives in the White House to justify the occupation of oil-rich Arab countries, inflate military spending, and expand Israel."[27] His name is often mentioned in reporting about 9/11 conspiracy theories.[28] Jones has published several papers suggesting that the World Trade Center was demolished with explosives, but his 2005 paper, "Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse?" was his first paper on the topic and was considered controversial both for its content and its claims to scientific rigor.[29] Jones' early critics included members of BYU's engineering faculty;[30] shortly after he made his views public, the BYU College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and the faculty of structural engineering issued statements in which they distanced themselves from Jones' work. They noted that Jones' "hypotheses and interpretations of evidence were being questioned by scholars and practitioners," and expressed doubts about whether they had been "submitted to relevant scientific venues that would ensure rigorous technical peer review."[31] Jones maintained that the paper was peer-reviewed prior to publication within a book "9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out" by D.R. Griffin[32] The paper was published in the online peer-reviewed, "Journal of 9/11 Studies", a journal co-founded and co-edited by Jones for the purpose of "covering the whole of research related to 9/11/2001." The paper also appeared in Global Outlook,[33] a magazine "seeking to reveal the truth About 9/11"[34] and in a volume of essays edited by David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott.[35] In April 2008, Jones, along with four other authors, published a letter in The Bentham Open Civil Engineering Journal, titled, 'Fourteen Points of Agreement with Official Government Reports on the World Trade Center Destruction'[36]. In August 2008, Jones, along with Kevin Ryan and James Gourley, published a peer-reviewed article in The Environmentalist, titled, 'Environmental anomalies at the World Trade Center: Evidence for energetic materials'.[37] And in April 2009, Jones, along with Niels H. Harrit and 7 other authors published a paper in The Open Chemical Physics Journal, titled, 'Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe'.[38] The editor of the journal, Professor Marie-Paule Pileni, an expert in explosives and nano-technology,[39][40] resigned after she received an e-mail from the Danish science journal Videnskab asking for her professional assessment of the article's content.[41][42] Jones was a founding member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth for approximately one year as co-chair with James H. Fetzer until Jones and a majority of the scholars members left the organization. From mid-November 2006 until the end of that year, Jones, Fetzer and a series of other researchers and individuals engaged in an open dispute about the direction the organization should take. Fetzer, who rejects the scientific method, claimed that Jones wanted to suppress exotic weaponry theories about 9/11, such as those of Judy Wood and Morgan Reynolds which suggested that the destruction of the WTC was caused by directed energy weapons from space, by mini-nukes, and that "cartoons", not planes, hit the buildings.[43] Jones and others examined the claims and delineated empirical reasons for rejecting them.[44]