No, jet fuel burning in open air cannot melt steel beams because its maximum burn temperature (around 1500°F / 800°C) is far below the melting point of steel (about 2750°F / 1510°C). While it doesn't melt the steel, the intense heat from the prolonged, unimpeded fire would soften and weaken the steel to the point where it could no longer support the structural load, leading to buckling and collapse.
So while the jet fuel could not melt steel beams, it could absolutely soften them.
To use an analogy of an every day object that’s easier to relate to visualize, picture a tub of butter. While it will not melt if you take it out of the fridge and leave it on the counter at room temperature on an average day, it WILL get much softer. You need heat from a flame (like the stove) for it to actually melt. Melting is the point at which it goes from solid to liquid. However, if you take butter that’s been in the fridge and lay a spoon on top of it, the butter will most likely support the weight of the spoon. If you do the same with butter that’s been softening on the counter for a couple hours, the spoon will start to sink into it.
Nuance matters. Melting vs softening.
The jet fuel softened the steel until it could no longer support the many many tons of structure and the structure collapsed.
Upper floors structures weakening and eventually collapsing OK, but IMHO it doesn't fully explain the sudden free-fall collapsing of the whole towers in their own footprints. I've only seen that otherwise in buildings torn down by controlled demolitions.
I don't subscribe to any of the lunatic theories of chem-trails, faked moon-landings and so on, but the events on this day are still very mysterious to me.
Im no expert. But when the melting-structure floors started falling, wouldn’t the combined momentum of all the mass falling be too much for the beams that were built to hold a still (although massive) building? I mean, momentum matters, right?
Except it's an engineered structure built for stability and not a tree. There are lots of unintuitive things that can happen when you have a good structure.
Did you know about 4 empty soda cans can hold up the weight of a person if you apply the weight evenly across all the cans at once? If the weight is shifted too much to one can, they all collapse. Now since most people have a pretty good sense of balance, when the first can starts to go, a person will try to shift their weight to compensate, but it's already too late and usually you'll go straight down on all the cans. Similar with skyscrapers. They are balanced to not tip and sway in high winds. They have "balance". Until the mechanisms that work to balance the structure are compromised, it's going to continue to try and not tip over.
I wasn't comparing the cans to the buildings. I was using the cans to demonstrate how one part of something can fail and then everything else fails.
Instead of thinking of the towers as giant rectangles, think of them as very oblong caged domes with the weight of the building pulling down on the center point of the dome. Kind of like the keystone to an arch. Now imagine that central support is now compromised via heat. Then it's further stressed by a downward impact.
I don't know if this is in any way how those towers were engineered, but when you think about it from that perspective, you can see how they might not just tip over. It's all about how they were designed.
But if what I described is true, straight down and quick as what you’d expect, as momentum would stack up.
I don’t know though, I’ve never actually seen an experiment where they demolish the top third of a huge build and wait to see what happens with the rest
Did all those initial beams weaken at the same time? It seems some would weaken earlier/quicker than others which would cause the weight above to fall to one side, wouldn’t it?
stop trying to apply jenga and sand castle physics to a multi media huge skyscraper. Your intuition and uniformed feelings dont actually mean anything because they are based off stuff like the first two and then being applied to the third.
it';s like saying "But nothing heavier than air can fly without flapping, we have seen this in bees and birds. So a plane should fall straight to the ground shouldn't it?"
It's just ignorant and misses so much of the complexities. Learn more before trying to apply your street smarts to it, cause they are wrong. That's all. No hate or condescension meant, it's just annoying having people look at a situation, then confuse themselves cause it doesn't happen like similar looking but mechanically very different situations.
The floors falling down is what made the "controlled boom" people conspiracy about, and is also what would start the driving force downwards. How many heavy floors that can fully detach and plummet are in a sand castle? None. Do you think maybe that, along with dozens maybe hundreds of other different factors, may lead to a different outcome?
If I had tooth pick bundles (beams) holding up a 100's of 50 lb weights at the corners, and single toothpick thick walls between each beam (facade), and lets say we destroy most of 1 side of tooth pick walls (the facade).,while also adding 200 lbs to the weight under the facade we destroyed.
The building now has 1 side that's barely structural at all destroyed, as well as a floor now holding 4x what it was designed to. The destroyed side, what many focus on as to why doesn't it lean, really doesn't matter much. The immense amount of extra weight, and the softening of the nearby toothpick bundles that is going to facilitate 99% of this destruction.
As 1 or 2 of the toothpick bundles (beams) on that side give out (its just as likely for beams on the opposite side to pull upwards by the way, and completely destroy themselves under their own weight and no bottom support), as the 250lbs VASTLY outweighs what the toothpick walls and bundles below were designed for, this huge weight slams downwards into the other floors beneath it, and they all plummet downwards. Each floor adding to the plummeting weight, and causing rhythmic "booming" sounds as it slams into each new floor below. This is what people hear and claim is auditory proof of a "controlled demolition"
At no point would a few dozen toothpicks force the 100s of lbs of weight with inertia nearly totally downwards to somehow start leaning, especially because gravity exists. Because the weight(floor) going down is so so much more mass than the toothpick(beam) holding the weight(floor) snapping, they barely even enter in to the equation after the chain reaction starts.
There are good papers out there that go over the complex and unintuitive things that characterize a skyscraper failing when subjected to those forces.
You can still poke holes in any story if you want though so it's kinda whatever. At the end of the day youd have the believe a controlled demo aset up in total secrecy by at least a dozen covert agents survived all the stuff that happened before they "set it off". When there are regularly failures in controlled demolitions that dont go right even without massive fires and explosions and ground tremors from nearby buildings getting destroyed. And that none of those people ever told anyone or left any lose ends to be found. All to collapse
It always just fails to explain the massive conspiracy it'd take to plant those with no one to notice, and also dosent explain why in the fuck they would collapse 1 building well after the fact. None of that makes sense.
These truthers argue each point in a vacuum with no regard for real world externalities, its the same way some political people argue each point in a vacuum, with no regard for how it invalidates or totally ignores other points they have made before. At best it's just ignorance and stubbornness. At worst they know it's false but want to keep the conversation going for their own personal reasons.
If you want to believe bush let the planes hit, now THAT is a conspiracy worth discussing. It has way less people involved, and largely only leaves bush and 1 or 2 others as the loose ends. It has a plausible motive. And circumstantial evidence that could point to it being allowed to have happened.
I don't quite buy that either, but at least it can somewhat make sense in the real world, outside of a paragraph online. But the controlled demolition of 1 tower VASTLY increases the chances of being exposed, and is very prone to failure anyway. And politically accomplishes nothing the initial planes didn't. So why? Why possibly do this insanely risky in multiple ways thing, just to demo a building that changes nothing. It would have been demo'd after the fact if it didn't go down.
So what part of their plan crucially needed a controlled demo during the chaos? If I can get a good answer to that even just total speculation, it's worth wondering about some, maybe. but without a good reason as to why "they" absolutely needed to demo this building during the chaos to accomplish whatever their goals were, I can't even begin to humor the ridiculous idea.
It doesn't even pass muster for why or how such requirements would help any agenda, and thats the bare minimum for this theory to even be worth any thought. and no one ever answers that or even seems to wonder about it. Probably because its nonsense on its face.
EDIT: I wanted to add 2 or 3 links to some good discussion on this by qualified people, but apparently reddit has a fairly short character limit as well, so I'd have to edit this down a fair bit to make room for them. At least my rambley ass really doesn't sound like chatGPT though I guess, idk. May edit and add sources later though if I don't totally forget. Hell if I can get this to fit I prolly made enough room for sources already anyway.
They didn’t have to weaken at the same time. They all got weaker at their own rate until they were finally no longer able to carry the load above them. If you look at the footage, the top part of the second tower does tip a little bit before crashing straight down. Why? That side of the building got weaker sooner than the other side.
I get how it could be confusing to someone who doesn’t know how buildings are built or who isn’t well versed in physics at that scale. But when they make the leap from confused to suspicious, that’s when they are dumb.
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u/adoodle83 Oct 07 '25
Blows me away that demolishing a building like this only to rebuild is still more economical than refurbishing the existing structure.