If any of you good people share my concern that the current regime is more fascist than conservative, please consider the following engineering claim of mine, put in lay terms. I know I only took mickey mouse physics, so please confine yourself to the merits of my argument. Make fun of me to my face at the next reunion.
Is it possible for a steel skyscraper to collapse just from fire at the speed of gravity into its own footprint? My answer is no, even though fire can get hot enough to melt steel. The reason is that before a structure would melt, it would lose it's strength and buckle. Thus it would not fall into its own footprint, and it would not fall at the speed of gravity.
Dave Slesinger dslesinger@alum.mit.edu MIT '72