> Unpopular question, how did a plane and jet fuel burn down a steel reinforced building?
That's the germ of a bunch of 20 year old paranoid conspiracy theories, basically the 2001 version of COVID denialism.
If you're asking a genuine question, there are decades-old engineering analyses and all kind of layman's translations of them that explain it. I'm sure they can be easily Googled.
Goes into depth debunking most of the conspiracies I've heard of.
My best ELI5 for the one you are asking about:
Does a bar of chocolate need to melt completely into a puddle of liquid before it changes shape and becomes softer?
Of course not. The chocolate bar will become mushy and deform before it becomes a liquid.
Jet fuel burns at 800 - 1500 F, whereas steel melts at 2750.
But just like chocolate on a warm day, it loses its strength at much lower temperatures. By 1500 degrees steel is at less than half of its strength.
Have you ever wondered how ancient civilizations managed to melt metals, or create ceramics? After all, they didn't have jet fuel yet!
Well, when some kilns use wood as a fuel source, they can burn at up to 2000 F! Wow! Isn't combustion neat?
The WTC was full of flammable materials like wood, plastic, rubber, and cloth. Jet fuel burns at 1500, but just like a wood kiln, other sources of combustion can make things much hotter.
TL;DR - You don't need to heat something to the point of being a puddle of liquid to weaken it.
> It's quite boringly predictable that someone would immediately link to a conspiracy debunking article.
It's almost as if the only people still going on about "interesting questions" regarding the destruction of the WTC buildings after two decades of analysis and reports are burner-account conspiracy theorists more interested in fantastic cover-ups than in the ugly and "boring" truth.
It should indeed be no surprise that asking questions like a conspiracy theorist gets you directed to conspiracy theorist answers.
The article literally describes what cause the building to collapse.
> After 7 hours of uncontrolled fires, a steel girder on Floor 13 lost its connection to one of the 81 columns supporting the building. Floor 13 collapsed, beginning a cascade of floor failures to Floor 5. Column 79, no longer supported by a girder, buckled, triggering a rapid succession of structural failures that moved from east to west. All 23 central columns, followed by the exterior columns, failed in what's known as a "progressive collapse"--that is, local damage that spreads from one structural element to another, eventually resulting in the collapse of the entire structure.
Perhaps read more than the headline and you would not think it so "curious".
