Imagine assembling a jigsaw puzzle of more than 14,000 pieces without an image on the box showing what the final picture will look like. Imagine that important pieces were missing and needed to be searched for. And imagine that this puzzle was four-dimensional, involving time as well as space.

This was the task for our small dedicated team in the wake of the World Trade Center (WTC) disaster on Sept. 11, 2001. In the weeks following the disaster, my colleagues in the Fire Research Division and I started to think about how we might assemble the story … Read more...