Mathematicians Solve Age-Old Spaghetti Mystery

If you happen to have a box of spaghetti in your pantry, try this experiment: Pull out a single spaghetti stick and hold it at both ends. Now bend it until it breaks. How many fragments did you make? If the answer is three or more, pull out another stick and try again. Can you break the noodle in two? If not, you're in very good company. From a report: The spaghetti challenge has flummoxed even the likes of famed physicist Richard Feynman '39, who once spent a good portion of an evening breaking pasta and looking for a theoretical explanation for why the sticks refused to snap in two. Feynman's kitchen experiment remained unresolved until 2005, when physicists from France pieced together a theory to describe the forces at work when spaghetti -- and any long, thin rod -- is bent. They found that when a stick is bent evenly from both ends, it will break near the center, where it is most curved. This initial break triggers a "snap-back" effect and a bending wave, or vibration, that further fractures the stick. Their theory, which won the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize, seemed to solve Feynman's puzzle. But a question remained: Could spaghetti ever be coerced to break in two?

The answer, according to a new MIT study, is yes -- with a twist. In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers report that they have found a way to break spaghetti in two, by both bending and twisting the dry noodles. They carried out experiments with hundreds of spaghetti sticks, bending and twisting them with an apparatus they built specifically for the task. The team found that if a stick is twisted past a certain critical degree, then slowly bent in half, it will, against all odds, break in two. The researchers say the results may have applications beyond culinary curiosities, such as enhancing the understanding of crack formation and how to control fractures in other rod-like materials such as multifiber structures, engineered nanotubes, or even microtubules in cells.

Wrong paper

[damn_registrars]

The link doesn't even go to the right journal - it goes to a paper in Nature when it says it is a PNAS paper - and the paper doesn't have anything to do with bending any kind of rod. The correct paper is Controlling fracture cascades through twisting and quenching [pnas.org].

Re:

[Aristos Mazer]

Editor appears to have fixed the link.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the real news. We should submit that as an article here!

Re:

[LifesABeach]

Lets take an assessment of things. Not Done: Anti-Gravity Generators, Personal Robot Power Supplies, Tourist Vacations on the Moon. Tasking Completed: Bending, then Breaking Spaghetti. Got it; everybody, get back to work.

Frosti pasto

[Hognoxious]

Did they try doing it underwater, or burying it in sand? That might damp the wave.

Re:

[Aristos Mazer]

Have you ever tried to break a stick of pasta under water? It gets a bit floppy.

Re:Frosti pasto

[kiviQr]

Ig Nobel Prize is in order for reasearch on breaking cooked/wet spaggetti in two pieces.

Re:

[Scarletdown]

This one sounds like an Iggy Prize to be proud of; just for the amusement factor, if nothing else. :D

Re:

[Hognoxious]

Your mom paid me. Does that count?

Smarter Every Day covered 3 piece breaks in slo-mo

[Solandri]

Smarter Every Day covered spaghetti snapping into 3 pieces [youtube.com]. Had to go all the way up to 250,000 fps to see what was happening.

Re:

[Tsolias]

He could have $200k grand and a PhD, but no... he chose to make a simple video.
this sickens me.

Re:

[dead_user]

I'd wager has has far north of $200k plus the PhD. Plus he got the chance to sit down with the president for a 1 on 1 about science education. Pretty solid cred if you ask me. Did you watch the video? It digs into the very science we are discussing.

Re:

[Tsolias]

I meant to say "grant"
excuse my ignorance.

Re:

[Tsolias]

yeah, I saw the video, a well-done one.

Re:

[fisted]

Damn, that true?

APK, I want to install your host file program, where can I download it? And is it any good?

Yes!

[NotFamous]

Never have I wanted to volunteer for a study so much! Seriously, it seems like common sense - the snap-back effect. And of course, if you apply torque the rotation will blunt the snap-back. But don't even get me started about the sauce,

Re:

[wyHunter]

And my mother could tell you how to do it she used to bend and break spaghetti like this all the time when I was growing up. She didn't have a pasta pot, so it had to be shorter to go in a saucepan.

Wait, this was a mystery?

[guruevi]

I've been able to snap spaghetti in two for ages, parents of small children around the world have known for ages. I didn't even know it was a problem.

Because, if you are like most people...

[Immerial]

...you grip it at the center with both hands and snap. This is talking about grabbing the ends to snap, not the middle.

Re:

[lgw]

I can also throw a pumpkin over a 1 story house, walk on water and hit a golf ball over a half mile (all of those are super easy by the way, but I wonder if anyone from MIT can figure them out with just common sense).

Trebuchet, trebuchet, and trebuchet?

Re:

[jae471]

Small pumpkin (like baseball size), small house. No problem.
Pour cup of water on sidewalk. Now walk on it. You're "walking on water".
???

Re:

[lgw]

Oh, all 3 can be solved by adding a hill (or cliff) to the set-up, if you want to be serious about it. But punkin chunkin is way more fun.

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[Scarletdown]

I can jump higher than the average house.

Re: Because, if you are like most people...

[dunkelfalke]

Most people can.

Re:

[Scarletdown]

Shhhhh... Don't give away the secret. :p

I make my spaghetti by hand you insensitive clod!

[WillAffleckUW]

Real people roll their own.

Dough you knot understand?

How do you *not* bend it evenly?

[OzPeter]

How do you not bend spaghetti evenly from both ends? Is this one of those one hand clapping koans?

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[deviated_prevert]

How do you not bend spaghetti evenly from both ends? Is this one of those one hand clapping koans?

Take a stick of spaghetti into outer space and in weightlessness with no atmosphere shake it like a conductors baton. The energy imparted to the end of the pasta will cause the stick to bend progressively in a wave. If the energy in a shake is at frequencies the stick will break at the harmonic nodes of the frequency in relation to the mass/length of the pasta. In space a whole forest of pasta trees can fall and no one will hear them break.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[HiThere]

Yes, but you're ignoring all the small pieces that break near the site of the main break (and fall into the boiling water).

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[jbengt]

Your younger self could have written the mathematical model underlying the theory of how twisting the spaghetti prevents multiple breaks?
Otherwise, you wouldn't have saved them any time.

Important Question...

[Thelasko]

Will this make a bistromathic drive possible?

Re:

[JustOK]

Needs more research on lunch time noodles, should there be a way to distribute them evenly amongst an odd number of diners who can't count?

The solution is obvious

[93 Escort Wagon]

I always get two perfect halves when I do the following - it's easy.

1) bind the spaghetti together into a tight bundle, using a couple rubber bands. Be sure both rubber bands are fairly close to the center of the bundle.
2) Run the bundle through a band saw.

Re:

[Scarletdown]

To quote Wile E. Coyote...

ouch. [youtube.com]

Dry pasta as a 'fry toy'

[Rick Schumann]

Kinda fun-sounding science, but frankly this sounds like something someone who is stoned would start doing, sitting there for hours on end, breaking pieces of dry spaghetti, one at a time.

Re:

[Phil Urich]

In all honesty and respect for him, "but frankly this sounds like something someone who is stoned would start doing" could quite often describe Richard Feynman.

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[Fly Swatter]

Whole wheat pasta tends to be more noodly even in it's dry form, it's probably more elastic and the shock waves dissipate quicker after the first crack.

As for twisting, it puts different tension into the pasta that changes the harmonics upon snapping.

solving the "spaghetti mystery"

[PJ6]

(sound of forks clinking on plates)
Frank: Whelp, looks like we solved the "spaghetti mystery".
Joe: How about we solve the "cheeseburger mystery" next week?
Bob: (trying to talk with a full mouth) ...mmm ...with math!

If I would have known this was a thing...

[WindowsStar]

Wow it took MIT 12 years to come up with the answer I already had. About 20 years ago a teacher told the class about the spaghetti mystery. We broke spaghetti in class and it always broke in 3 or 4 pieces. I was so intrigued by this I went home that night and went through 2 boxes of spaghetti when I figured out that twisting them a bit would make them break in half. I was so excited about the discovery we talked about it in class the next day. If I would have known this was a thing...I would have written it

Re:

[jbengt]

Again, the point is not that twisting spaghetti was a discovery, but that they developed a mathematical model that explains how that works.

Re:

[iggymanz]

no, actually the point is that even Richard Fucking Feynmann didn't figure out the twist, forget about modeling when your brain can't even go outside the pasta snapping box that far.

Should Have Done Research

[hcs_$reboot]

These people have a lot of free time.

Re:

[ledow]

Sigh.

Allow me to explain once again.

Intellectual puzzles like this lead to real-world mathematics that gets incorporated into huge things like engineering tables and safety laws, that translate to real-world buildings, runways, etc. that "work better" in some fashion than they otherwise would.

Why does a material, under stress, fracture elsewhere than the stress point? That seems to me to be an incredibly important thing to understand, especially if you're putting your main masses on those secondary/tertiar

I wished I'd known

[shaitand]

If I'd realized someone was trying to solve this problem I could have helped out. I've been snapping spaghetti in this manner for as long as I can remember sans fancy rig.

Question

[bigdavex]

Physics is neat.

Also, why don't they make spaghetti smaller? Would people who make spaghetti in giant pots object to spaghetti sized for normal pots?