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MIT mathematicians solve age-old spaghetti mystery
- jgh 8y agoI guess I've never tried doing it one noodle at a time or something, cause breaking a bunch of them at once results in them broken in two. Maybe they prevent each other from snapping back enough to break again?
- smcl 8y agoI've never bothered to break them - why would you want tiny bits of spaghetti? Also wouldn't noodles be something completely different - like when I think "noodles" I think of an Asian dish, not a plate of spaghetti.
- Hansi 8y agoI find breaking in two as a bunch convenient since it makes it slightly easier to manage lengths. I do smaller for my daughter (2yo) since she struggles with scooping up the long ones on her own but is fine with smaller bits.
- pavel_lishin 8y agoMy 2.5 year old has the opposite issue; she learned the twist-the-fork method, which doesn't work well for short noodles. (Although, to be honest, half the time she just uses her hands.)
- sp332 8y agoIt's called a "spaghetti noodle", like in the subheading of the article.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- TheRealPomax 8y ago*in the US (but not necessarily in other English speaking countries)
- Ensorceled 8y agoNoodle is from a German root so not sure why you think of "noodles" as Asian. I break spaghetti in half when I'm going to be stirring the cooked pasta into vegetables as opposed to serving a sauce on top of it.
- smcl 8y agoJust looking around and this seems like it's a US-UK english difference: https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2015/08/noodles.html https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2015/08/nood... And the reason I figured this would be weird is that long pasta is easy to eat with a fork. Probably not worth dwelling on this though as it's offtopic so people are downvoting :D
- jgh 8y agothe noodles are something like 10-12" long so you don't really end up with tiny bits of spaghetti. It just makes it easier to cook in a smaller pot.
- TangoTrotFox 8y agoTake the bundle of spaghetti of spaghetti in one hand, place it vertically in the pot with boiling water, push down on the bundle from the top with your other hand. As the bottom part heats up and moistens the spaghetti will become immediately pliable and start going down and spreading out (in an appealingly geometric fashion), within a matter of seconds. You could cook 10" spaghetti, whole, in a 5" diameter pot with no problems.
- sidlls 8y agoLikely the way you are breaking them is different from what is described here. To do what is described in the article hold the spaghetti noodle by pressing either end to the index fingers of your hands and press inward to create a bowing effect, then continue to exert force until it snaps. Probably what you're doing is just grabbing a handful closer to the center and folding the noodles.
- firethief 8y agoYou mean as a bundle? That makes sense, they'd dampen each others vibrations.
- deburo 8y agoOdd, I saw that spaghetti phenomenon on smartereveryday just a few days ago, but it appears it was posted in 2014. Heh. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADD7QlQoFFI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADD7QlQoFFI Anyway, very cool.
- Anon84 8y agoNot sure what the big deal is... this was solved back in 2005 in one of the top physics journals https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.095505 https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.95...
- bachmeier 8y agoFTA: "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?"
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- JakeWesorick 8y ago"Feynman’s kitchen experiment remained unresolved until 2005, when physicists from France pieced together a theory to describe the forces at work when spaghetti...But a question remained: Could spaghetti ever be coerced to break in two?" gotta read the article man
- compiler-guy 8y agoThat explains why the stresses present always split the tube in more than two pieces, but it does not prove that there is no possible way to get it to split in only two. This paper demonstrates a way for it to only split in two. And therefore is a significant advance over the original.
- oh_sigh 8y agoUnderstanding what the deal is starts with reading the article and not just the headline
- iaw 8y agoFun fact: when a cylindrical shaped object fractures from a twisting stress it leaves 45 degree break patterns. Try it with a pencil.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- SquirrelOnFire 8y agoDepends on the material. Brittle materials will. Ductile materials tend to break on a 90 degree plane - https://goo.gl/images/QYMJmf https://goo.gl/images/QYMJmf
- mygo 8y agowhat are you the hulk? I can’t twist a Ticonderoga
- phyzome 8y agoAh, cool! I also wonder if the twisting stress means that the noddle breaks before it is bent quite as far, which would also reduce the snap-back effect. I also wonder if the twist-back breaks up the snap-back waves by redirecting their momentum.
- bryanrasmussen 8y agofinally my code will be clean!
- semi-extrinsic 8y agoI don't get how this is an interesting result. When you are allowed to change the applied stress (not just simple bending), getting it to break into just two pieces is easy. By holding the spaghetti with two fingers at each end and applying compression together with bending, i.e. making the spaghetti look kinda like a sine wave from bottom to bottom, I can break spaghettis into just two pieces with success rate well above 50%. And I have confirmed with simple bending of shorter spaghettis that it's not just because of a shorter effective length. Here's a picture of five spaghettis broken into just two pieces, along with one unbroken for comparison: https://imgur.com/a/gOTiHG3 https://imgur.com/a/gOTiHG3 Now I gotta explain to my wife why there are broken spaghettis.
- sova 8y agoI find it more interesting that the casual behavior is to break into multiple pieces. Twisting is a neat way to add more input into a very simple system.
- lsh 8y agois that actually spaghetti though? it looks like linguine ...
- nosefrog 8y agoAccording to the article, the model doesn't apply to linguini, so I'm not surprised it doesn't always break into 3+ pieces.
- semi-extrinsic 8y agoIt's perfectly ordinary spaghetti (Barilla's no. 5 to be specific).
- andrewflnr 8y agoYou make it sound like "changing the applied stress" is cheating, like they're equivocating on the problem. But the problem is just breaking spaghetti with your hand, by any means necessary for providing good entertainment. And challenging the unstated assumptions of a problem is often the most interesting way to solve it. Anyway, sounds like it was interesting enough to make you do a bunch of experiments.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- TheRealPomax 8y agoHm, it's interesting that this was unsolved for so long, given that any pasta chef can teach you how to break spaghetti, fettucini, etc. in two by twisting while bending. Very odd.
- mec31 8y agoNow if only someone could explain why toppled smokestacks break into three pieces, my life would be complete :-)
- lurquer 8y agoI've been trying this all night, and I can't get any of them to break. Maybe I overcooked it.