Your analogy/analysis doesn’t really apply here because it does take into account members of these professions outside the US, esp. those in countries hostile to the US and/or Islamic counties (where explanations taking Muslims ‘off the hook’ would be welcome) or even countries friendly to the US but where emotions about 9/11 don’t run so high. I doubt even in Canada this would be an issue. Nor does it take into account the dozens of Americans with a wide variety of professions who publicly embrace (“unofficial”) 9/11 CTs.

There must be at least a million civil engineers worldwide*. Brazil’s Oscar Niemeyer is a national hero and an arch-Communist, he hates the US and continues to be a “think outside the box” architect well into his 90s, but he didn’t say anything, why not? What about architects and engineers from Muslim countries where IIRC about 80 % of the population believes 9/11 was an “inside job” or other countries hostile to the US? What about Cuban, Chinese and French experts. Surprisingly not one of them said anything. Saying the towers were demolished would not lead to them being ostracized, I would imagine quite the opposite.

Even in the US the supposed threat of ostracism or job loss has not stopped scientists and academics from publicly stating their controversial views publicly in groups like “SPINE” and “Academics for 9/11 Truth” etc. What about the various webmasters and authors of books alleging conspiracy, have any of them been ‘burned’? What ill effects have Griffith and Rupert suffered other than making small fortunes peddling conspiracies? I am sure some one will want to mention the case of that guy from UL who got fired, but IIRC he got bounced for using UL letterhead and if he had expressed his views as a private individual he probably would still be employed. As for job security how many of these professionals are public servants (who can’t be fired for expressing their views) or tenured college professors or retired?

This rationalization sells civil engineers and architects short. Various physicists, electrical engineers and other scientists, economists, computer scientists, MDs are members of the “9/11 truth” movement. No to mention that the history of science is full brave souls who weren’t afraid of scorn and put forth theories that were greatly at odds with accepted beliefs. Many it turn out were wrong and are now “footnotes” but others like Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, Einstein, Freud etc “rewrote the science books”. There are many less famous examples: the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine disagreed with prevailing opinion about the causes of ulcers, there are medical researchers who don’t believe that HIV causes AIDS, they are pariahs in the research community but they persist. Recently astronomers, physical anthropologists an undoubtedly scientist in other fields have gone against prevailing opinion.

Why should civil engineers and architects be any different? Frank Lloyd Wright, I.M. Pei, van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Niemeyer, those responsible for the WTC, Ingall's Building, Home Insurance Building etc. etc. were not afraid to break norms.There was a civil engineer who publicly backed “Creationism” and Arthur Butz a professor of Electrical Engineering at Northwestern is a leading Holocaust denier. Although these positions have nothing to do with engineering I'm sure this doesn’t make them very popular with their colleagues. Butz will never be invited to address the IEEE [Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers].

The ASCE (Am. Soc. Of Civil Engineers) has “over 137,500 members”* the AIA (Am. Inst. of Arch.) has “more than 75,000”** members that gives a total of over 212,000. Are all of them so “blind“ that none of them perceive what CTs claim are violations of basic laws of physics obvious to anyone or don’t have the courage to come forward? Hard to believe. If there was some thing wrong with the “collapse theory” a it least a few at the very least should have said something. If they based their contrary views there is no reason to believe they would ostracized at all let alone to the extent CTs think.

The Copernicus analogy does not hold. In his day as you freely admit the consequences of heresy were extremely severe, as I have shown above the consequences of speaking out should not be a factor. In his day there were not any layman said or believed the Sun was the center of the “solar” system, today there are thousands if not millions of people who believed the towers were brought down with explosives. In his day ’science’ and ‘religion’ were inexorably tied and the “scientific method” was not used, indeed many date the beginning of the Scientific Revolution to the publication of Copernicus’ works ****, that the Earth was at the center of the Universe was taken as a matter of faith. To be fair to the geoscientists in Copernicus’ day we had far less info about our Universe than we did a few decades later compare this to the collapses of the WTC towers one of the most studied structural failures of all time.

If the excepted explanation of the collapses of the Towers so violates scientific principles as many 9/11 conspiracists believe there is no logical explanation why no relevant experts from anywhere in the World would not come forward publicly. The fact that more than four years later none have this leads to only one inevitable conclusion, the Towers collapsed due to the impact damage caused by large jets crashing into them at high speed and the resultant fires.

Did Bush plan 9/11? I wouldn’t put it past the SOB but think it highly unlikely. Did he know about it but do nothing or did he intentionally “provoke” Muslim extremists? Possibly but the evidence in support of such theories is not very convincing. Was he negligently disinterested in the threat of terrorism before 9/11? I would say definitely so, but these questions are outside the scope of this thread


* If there are over 212,000 just in the US, the Worldwide total is easily over 1 million.
** http://www.asce.org/inside/profile.cfm

***http://aia.org/join_categories

**** http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/timel.htm