conspiratemus1

Thanks for that. The half-second of the video that shows the bike on the ground, intact, post-crash, is the most important contribution to this whole thread. Throws all the pseudo-engineering mumbo-jumbo out the window. (I'm not saying that statements about the properties of carbon-fibre-matrix structures are not correct. I'm just saying that they don't explain the failure of this structure.)

If most of us had seen a photo of any old bike snapped in two, like the photo at the top of the thread, we would have asked, "What happened to that bike? A car run over it?" And sure enough, just as common sense would tell us, the answer was, "Yup!" But for some reason, the default "explanation" when it's a CF bike is, "It must have as-ploded JRA!"

A couple of decades ago, there was an urban legend going around that people could spontaneously combust into ashes. Earnest investigative TV news shows (I think there is an oxymoron in there somewhere) covered the phenomenon with some persistence, showing as "evidence" some obviously faked and staged photos. (This was before PhotoShop.) Oh, and eye-witness accounts, like the ones describing alien abductions. I remember one photo of a small pile of ashes over a burned hole in a hardwood floor, straddling which was an aluminum-framed walker. The elderly victim, using his walker, was said to have gone up in smoke, "just like that." There was no soot (or charred bits of the dear departed) on the walker tubes and the rubber feet, despite standing in contact with the burned floor, were intact. Weirdly, the obvious absurdity of the photos seemed to buttress, rather than debunk, the spontaneous combustion theory. I guess if you have a preposterous lie to spread, the best agent is preposterous evidence. Aside from the understandable motives like insurance fraud or covering up a homicide, it was never clear what drove this whole meme (as I think we would call it today, but there was no Internet then). People just like to believe goofy, bizarre things that seem to prove that "Science can't explain everything, you know..." And feelings trump words which trump numbers. (Please, mods, note the lower-case "t", OK?)

We (and I include myself here, which is why I find @shoota's post so bracing) are too slow to include, "Well, s/he (or it, in the case of a photo) could be lying, you know," as one of the possible explanations for something that doesn't quite make sense but would so totally validate our world view if it were true. If only.