Reply #132: Try it

[William Seger]

I'm pretty sure it would predict that bounce, if you dropped it from a height of several times its own height. Would that tell you anything useful about the towers?

Yes, your blowtorch experiment proves that heat reduces the strength of steel, which is not surprising. Your original experiment might have actually produced some useful results, too, if you had first determined the maximum strength of your model and then retested it during the fire (and it would also be useful to know what temperature the steel wire reached).

Since you didn't do that, the experiment didn't prove anything; and in fact, if you concluded from that experiment that "ordinary" fire doesn't weaken steel, then your experiment was flawed to the point of producing results that are well known to be false.

And, even if you had measured the before- and during-fire strength, that wouldn't tell you much about how the towers would react to fire, since the structural similarity between your model and the towers is so superficial. (For example, as others have already pointed out, your model's perimeter columns support themselves, whereas the towers' perimeter wall could never have stood under their own weight, much less the weight of the floors, without having the floors every 13 feet to restrain them from buckling.)