Attorney John Reis wrote an excellent article on NFPA 1033 Challenges in the July 2015 issue of the Fire and Arson Investigator, It includes definitions of all 16 topics.
The OSAC Subcommittee on Fire and Explosion Investigations has been working on the list of 16 in order to give it a coherent organization, and define and limit the topics in the list. For example, "thermodynamics" is a huge field, most of which does not apply to fire investigations. We suggest that the investigator know the three laws of thermodynamics as well as the ideal gas law.
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www.nist.gov]