Originally Posted by bhkad

I heard him on the Howard Stern show and if the people of Minnesota had really known what a loon he was before electing him he'd have never seen the inside of the state capitol except as a guest or tourist.

As far as the collapse of the Twin Towers is concerned I will prove the principle of their collapse even though jet fuel burns at a relatively low temperature.

No one is saying that the temperatures on the beams was hot enough to melt the steel. Just soften it. And over the course of time the fires raged the steel beams and girders were exposed to that jet fuelled heat.

And what happens when you warm a metal? It loses it's strength.

When you break a wire clothes hanger in two pieces you bend the wire back and forth, forth and back and the more you bend it the more heat is generated. And the warmer it gets the less force you need to bend the wire until it finally breaks as a result of the pressure you built up and the heat you generated.

The heat from bending isn't hot enough to melt the metal, but it is enough to weaken the metal so that the pressure you exert is enough to cause the metal to fail and break.

That is what happened in the WWTC collapse.

The jet fuel burned for a while and softened the metal girders. It did not melt them, it weakened them. And when they became weak enough the weight of the floors exerted sufficient pressure to cause structural failure of the metal and they all fell atop the next one down and so on until they stood no more.

The metal was warmed long enough to become so weak that the beams and girders no longer had the strength to support the weight they had held for 30 years.

Period.