*World Trade Center collapse* (matched from canon)

Appears in 1 lecture.

Appearances across the corpus

MSE_F2017_07 · Materials Selection and Economics, Fall 2017 · §10.p2

First of all, you have to know who you're writing for. There's an article I wrote. Joel Clarke was asked to write an article on the World Trade Center a couple weeks after it collapsed, and he said, "Oh, that's Tom Eagar." So the journal editor called me in. I was so sick of hearing the news reports about the steel melting. I'd been to fire scenes — no steel melts in a regular fire, and I knew that. So I wrote an article. I spent about three hours writing this paper, and within six months it was the most requested or most read article on the World Trade Center, and it stayed there for about nine years, even ahead of the government report. The reason is because I knew who I was writing it for. When I sat down to write this, I said, I'm going to write this for a good high school science student. I want to write it so that people can understand it. You don't have to be a scientist to understand this. As a result, a lot of people liked it and could understand it. But also as a result, a lot of people hate me. There are whole websites — they were writing to the president of MIT saying I should lose my tenure, he's just a government shill. Anybody who knows me knows I'm not a government shill.