Jones Beene wrote: > ----- Original Message ---- > From: Jed Rothwell > > Why do you persist in creating ridiculous straw-men to demolish? > > That is so juvenile. Is winning an argument more important to you than > finding the truth in these allegations? > > No one has suggested "arson" per se in this discussion. We should all > agree that the fire in WTC7 was started by the debris from the impact of > hijacked airplanes, and that Al Qa-ida is the prime culprit for that. > That is really not the present issue. > > We have specifically tried to limit the overriding question to whether > or not there was themite/themate -- and if that chemical was responsible > for the molten metal. Aviation fuel is not capable of melting steel in > normal combustion.
Has anyone here attempted to answer the following three questions? The first two would involve a little tedious research but are otherwise straightforward, but the most important -- #3 -- seems hard. 1) How much energy is released by ~ 2000 pounds of thermite? (I think that was the amount discussed.) 2) How does that compare with the energy released when the buildings collapsed? I'd expect that the collapse energy completely dwarfed the energy that would come from a 1 ton thermite bomb, of course, though I haven't actually run the numbers, partly because by itself that comparison doesn't tell us anything; the interesting question here is #3: 3) Now, the hard one: A lot of the energy of collapse went into pulverizing the concrete and breaking or bending steel beams, and some went into shock waves and assorted other transport mechanisms and was carried away. However, some undoubtedly also went into *heat* which remained on site. So, the $64 question is: How much of the energy of collapse is likely to have turned into heat on-site? My guess -- and it is nothing more than a guess -- is that a significant fraction of the collapse energy *did* turn into heat, and that, in fact, the amount of heat generated was large enough to melt a significant amount of steel. But this is just a guess, and I would love to see some calculations which either confirm or refute it. Anybody got such calculations on tap?
