Hyroglyphx writes:
quote:
And then they say really stupid shit like Rosie O'Donnell, who seems to think that it's impossible for fire to melt steel.
Well, the sad thing is that the stupid comment shows a complete lack of understanding about how metals react under heat. Specifically, you don't need to melt the metal in order to make it incapable of supporting the weight that it's bearing. It's how blacksmithing works: The heat softens the metal and makes it pliable. When you cast items, you do liquefy the metal in order to work with it, but wrought materials aren't done with molten metals but with softened metal.
All that needed to be done was to have enough heat to soften the supporting struts such that they warped out of shape due to the load they were bearing. This would transfer the load onto areas that were not designed to carry that much weight and the system would collapse.
You can prove this for yourself: Take a paperclip and repeatedly bend it back and forth. Eventually, it will snap at the point where you're bending it. If you feel the ends where it snapped, you'll find they are at least warm if not hot. The mechanical action of bending the clip heats it up. It never got hot enough to melt: The melting point of steel is about 1350C. However, it did get hot enough to destabilize the crystalline structure of the atoms and cause it to fail.
[Note: There is more going on than just the heat: Bending of the metal will break the crystalline structure in and of itself, but the heat generated from the bending will make it happen more quickly.]
The conspiracy nuts want to make it a case of either/or: As if the only way a beam can collapse is if it melted. Thus, since it didn't melt, it must have been deliberately sabatoged. It doesn't occur to them that neither answer is correct.
Rrhain
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