Niels Harrit has been Associate Professor at the Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen, for 37 years. This is a translation of a feature article printed in the Danish Newspaper, Information, on 31 March 2007 (requires subscription). Images have been added below to support the text.
How, not why, did World War Three start?
We are not talking about conspiracy theories, absolutely not. We are talking about elementary physics and chemical processes, Newton's laws, gravity, the melting point of steel, and the like.
The World Trade Center was a complex made up of several buildings. The best-known, of course, were the two towers, WTC1 and WTC2. Together with five other smaller buildings – numbered 3, 4, 5 and 6 – they formed a perimeter around a central plaza. On the far side of building 6, over 100 metres from the North Tower (WTC1), was building seven (WTC7). It was a very large 47-storey office building. The two towers collapsed on 11 September 2001, after each was struck by an airplane. Everyone on the globe who had access to a television set has seen the dramatic and tragic images. However, to this day, only very few people are aware of the existence of WTC7 or its fate. This building was not hit by any airplane, but still collapsed seven hours after the towers. This feature article is about that event. |
WTC7 was built around a core of 24 massive steel columns, connected by an asymmetric pattern of steel cross beams. The building periphery was made up of 57 smaller columns. There was enough redundant capacity in the design to handle loads several times greater than foreseeable loads from hurricanes or earthquakes, etc.
The collapse of the nearest tower, WTC1, caused damage to the lower floors in the southwest corner of WTC7. Building debris from the high tower and large amounts of dust poured in through the windows. Randomly distributed fires then broke out on other lower floors in the building. One of the other buildings in the complex, WTC5, was much more seriously damaged by the collapse of WTC1, but the rest of the structure remained standing.
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