`World Trade Center collapse`

Tom's three-hour-research *JOM* article that became his most-cited publication, used as an example of (a) the principle that good engineering reasoning can illuminate any subject quickly, (b) the truther-conspiracy follow-on, and (c) the thermal-conductivity error in the truther rebuttal book. The "you don't melt steel in a building fire" point is the technical anchor.

Come to class, ask questions. I would rather answer your question than give a lecture. There are other things on Stellar right now if you want to read things. There's an article that I wrote about six weeks after the World Trade Center collapsed, because I was so sick of reading things in the paper that were just outright wrong about the collapse of the World Trade Center. People said, oh, the fire was so hot it melted the steel. If you could melt steel that easily, we didn't need Henry Bessemer in the 1860s to teach us how to melt steel. You don't melt steel in any type of building fire. I've seen oil rigs where you have a 60-foot flame — I can show you a video of a 60-foot flame in an oil rig and the thing lasts four hours. Finally it collapses, not because the steel melted, but because it just got so hot and so weak it falls over like cooked spaghetti.

Tom's role as published commentator and ongoing target of conspiracy-theorist correspondence. Used pedagogically to show how observed phenomena (sparks during the collapse) admit multiple explanations — thermite reaction vs. electrical arcing of high-power conductors.

There are people who believe the World Trade Center didn't fail because the planes hit it, but because of a government plot — they actually set off thermite reactions inside and cut the beams in two. 18% of Americans apparently believe the US government destroyed the World Trade Center. It's called the 9/11 conspiracy theory. I'm a major foil for this because I wrote an article on the World Trade Center, why it collapsed. As of yesterday — there's something called 9/11 TV, and they sent me two DVDs and they want me to watch their theory. They look at the World Trade Center, see all these sparks coming out, and they say, see, that's proof of a thermite reaction. I said, when did they turn off the electricity in the building? Because if you have a fire and two electrical conductors with four megawatts of electrical power behind them touch each other, you'll get a shower of sparks too. All these things they say are proof usually have another explanation. But I've been listening to this for years on the World Trade Center.

Cited rhetorically, not as a developed case. Tom mentions the article he wrote two weeks after the collapse, which led the Google results for "WTC collapse" for nearly a decade. Used to make the writing-for-a-general-reader point — the article succeeded because it was pitched at a high-school science student.

I've given you some other handouts. One's an article I wrote a couple weeks after the World Trade Center collapsed, which for about eight or ten years was the number one article if you looked up Google "WTC collapse." The reason it was the number one article is I was asked by an editor to write it. I was so sick of hearing false information, like the steel melted in the fire. Anyone who's ever been to a fire knows that steel doesn't melt in a fire. If steel melted in the fire, we didn't need Sir Henry Bessemer in 1856 to teach us how to melt steel — we would have been melting it for a few thousand years before that. I wrote this in three hours, which is less time than it took for me to write any of my several hundred publications. I've gotten more comments on this, positive and negative, than any paper I've ever written, or actually all of the papers combined. Why? Because I wrote it for a high school science student. I was trying to write it so someone could understand it.

The American Welding Society structural welding code has a static and a dynamic side. Static for buildings is 5/3. The World Trade Center was 5/3. I gave you an article I wrote, and I used that 5/3. That building would have been built to the AWS structural welding code. The AWS structural welding code is a companion to the boiler code — something for bridges dynamic, something for buildings static. Bridges are dynamic with trucks going over them — dynamic why? Because you've got fatigue. Buildings, it's not really fatigue, not at the high level of stress. So those things make sense.

Tom's three-hour-write *Journal of Metals* article. Used as the pedagogical model for the course: write so a high school senior can follow it, but anchor in fundamental principles (color pyrometry, Planck's law). The conspiracy-theorist response and the 500°F vs. 900°F dispute.

If I knew how to teach it, I would try to do that for you too. I don't know exactly how to teach it, but I'm going to hand out a paper which out of my several hundred publications is the most referenced paper I've ever written. It took me less time to write this paper than any other paper I've ever written. About three hours. Two weeks after the World Trade Center collapse, the editor of the Journal of Metals called Joel Clark first — Professor Clark — and said, "Would you write an article on the World Trade Center collapse?" He says, "Well, why don't you call Tom Eagar?" So he called me. I was so sick of hearing people tell me in the newspapers, "This fire was so hot that it melted steel."