As I recall, much as I enjoyed discussions with TM, he and I differed greatly on this subject. No, I am not a scientist, but I did draw on my
blacksmithing knowledge and 35 years at the work.
When the heat starts to rise in steel, it weakens much faster than many think..at about 1200 F, it is already down to about 50% of it's original
tensile strength..at which it is beyond red to a reasonable glow...although not yet a tangerine color.
With my coal forge burning quiescently by itself, it may not run very high temp; but as soonas I start the blower, the heat quickly rises to 1475 F,
or the austenetic state ...where the molecules in the steel are racing around almost fluidly, and I can harden the steel by quenching.
between 2700 and 2800F , when the surface is flowing white, I vcan forge weld..and at about 3300 F, steel melts to a puddle.
Yes, Kerosene may
ignite at about 500 F..but rarely is such a fuel left to burn on it's own. It is usually utilized under
compression or used in a venturi, such as a jet engine.
I suggest that the towers, once penetrated, and with the fuel spreading over the adjacent floors and running down elevator and stairwell shafts,
created a near perfect venturi setup.
Only the one or two floors actually struck had to suffer from effects enough to bring the steel girders to easily over 1200+ F. So if the strcture was
built with a 30% safety marthe steel at easily over 1200+F..or likely even more, was sure to collapse.
What's more, once the first couple floors collapsed, their sheer weight would drive the rest of the floors down, adding the weight of an extra floor
at each story. This especially when steel adjacent to the stairwells and elevator shafts are likewise weakened.
..And please keep this in mind.. Usama Bin Laden graduated from King Abdul Aziz University in Jiddah with a degree in civil engineering.
From Scientific American;
No melted steel, no collapsed towers.
For example, according to www.911research.wtc7.net, steel melts at a temperature of 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, but jet fuel burns at only 1,517 degrees F. No melted steel, no collapsed towers. "The planes did not bring those towers down; bombs did," says www.abovetopsecret.com. Wrong. In an article in the Journal of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society and in subsequent interviews, Thomas Eagar, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explains why: steel loses 50 percent of its strength at 1,200 degrees F; 90,000 liters of jet fuel ignited other combustible materials such as rugs, curtains, furniture and paper, which continued burning after the jet fuel was exhausted, raising temperatures above 1,400 degrees F and spreading the inferno throughout each building. Temperature differentials of hundreds of degrees across single steel horizontal trusses caused them to sag--straining and then breaking the angle clips that held the beams to the vertical columns. Once one truss failed, others followed. When one floor collapsed onto the next floor below, that floor subsequently gave way, creating a pancaking effect that triggered each 500,000-ton structure to crumble. Conspiricists argue that the buildings should have fallen over on their sides, but with 95 percent of each building consisting of air, they could only have collapsed straight down.
All the 9/11 conspiracy claims are this easily refuted. On the Pentagon "missile strike," for example, I queried the would-be filmmaker about what happened to Flight 77, which disappeared at the same time. "The plane was destroyed, and the passengers were murdered by Bush operatives," he solemnly revealed. "Do you mean to tell me that not one of the thousands of conspirators needed to pull all this off," I retorted, "is a whistle-blower who would go on TV or write a tell-all book?" My rejoinder was met with the same grim response I get from UFOlogists when I ask them for concrete evidence: Men in Black silence witnesses, and dead men tell no tales.
RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS
MICHAEL SHERMER is publisher of Skeptic magazine (www 
