Rosie is stunningly stupid. She has stated that steel cannot be melted by fire and that the World Trade Center towers could not have been brought down without explosives. So, this leads me to think that she believes explosives are merely capable of intense heat. The fact is that explosives dish out intense pressure, notably, the same amounts of pressure you get from the hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete, steel, flooring, desks, ducting, air recycling systems, water fountains, bathrooms all sitting on top of metal. The only difference between explosives and fire is that fire heats metal slowly, decreasing its tensile strength while explosives rapidly decrease the tensile strength by decreasing the flowing temperature. Here is an article I wrote in November of 2006 in response to Charlie Sheen’s identically moronic and identically amateur rhetoric.
As many Americans are, I am quite fed up with these foolish conspiracy nimrods that hold up "facts" that "prove" 9/11 was a Bush conspiracy. They trot out simple explanations as to why it "couldn't have happened that way" without taking into account the entire situation. They utilize pseudoscience and exclude anything that would NOT support an insane theory.
It is simple enough to debunk such nonsense by showing the sheer numbers of people who would have to be in on the conspiracy. Yet I wish to focus on one scientific "fact" that is regarded by the nut-jobs as one of the main "proofs" that 9/11 was not terrorists.
Statements have been made that jet fuel (and the generic term is always used, not the actual composition or name) does not burn hot enough to melt steel. Thus the structure of the trade center towers would not have collapsed. Then without any evidence they state that a bomb would have been the only thing capable of destroying the structure. Hmm, I recall that in 1993 a massive bomb did not take out the structure but that aside there is plenty of fallacy in the argument about the burning of jet fuel.
The standard jet fuel is mostly kerosene but has many other chemicals in it as well. Now, industrial grade steel does indeed have a higher melting point than such fuels can burn. Typically steel (even industrial grade structural steel) melts around 2500° Fahrenheit (1000° degrees higher than kerosene fuels can burn). So this is as far as the pseudo scientists backing the conspiracies believe they need to go to prove that fuel could not bring down the towers.
But a structure is not a benign piece of metal and does not share the same properties as a piece of steel placed in a fire. There is not only one form of metal becoming alike liquid. Metal will melt at certain temperatures but metal will also flow at certain pressures. This process is in some respects a way of lowering the melting point of steel to room temperature. Quite simply, if the pressures on one side of a metal beam overcome the strength of the beam then the metal will literally flow in the direction the pressure pushes it. This process is generally extremely rapid and seemingly explosive. On slow motion video it appears mostly as a tear ripping through the metal or sometimes can appear as the metal stretching and twisting.
Now, just as increasing the pressure on an object lowers the actual flowing point so does increasing the temperature of metal decreases amount of pressure it can withstand before flowing. Put temperature and pressure together and you have rapid structural failure.
As it pertains to 9/11 the twin towers had a multi-fold problem. Not only was the demand on the structure intense with 20+ floors above the strike points but the jet fuel heated the steel up to about 1000° Fahrenheit. At that temperature the strength of the steel is divided by a factor of ten. That means that if the structure was capable of holding up 50 tons then it is now capable of only supporting 5 tons. The structural metal did not "sag" because they were melting. They sagged because they were flowing.
On a note about conspiracies, I would urge anyone who believes in them to take an honest look at why they find this sort of evidence compelling. It is no secret that many see a conspiracy before they find evidence of it and once you already believe something it is not hard to find what you want to find, even less difficult with the advent of the internet zoo of opinion.
Summing up, I would like to add that Rosie O’Donnell, Charlie Sheen, Sean Penn and others have only a pulpit and no sense of reality. None of these Hollywood elites have ever done any research on steel engineering. Listening to anything they say is akin to taking marital advice from a barn door (or a barn in Rosie’s case). If what they say bothers you and bothers you further when you hear other people agree out of stupidity or star-struck-ness, just let it go. Arguing with fools is a waste of time.