MIT mathematicians solve age-old spaghetti mystery

http://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-mathematicians-solve-age-old-spaghetti-mystery-0813

by denzil_correa • 8 years ago

171 35 8 years ago

news.mit.edu

jgh2• 8 years ago

I 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?

smcl2• 8 years ago

I'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• 8 years ago

I 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.

sp332• 8 years ago

It's called a "spaghetti noodle", like in the subheading of the article.

Ensorceled• 8 years ago

Noodle 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.

jgh2• 8 years ago

the 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.

sidlls• 8 years ago

Likely 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• 8 years ago

You mean as a bundle? That makes sense, they'd dampen each others vibrations.

deburo• 8 years ago

Odd, 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

Anyway, very cool.

Anon84• 8 years ago

Not 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...

bachmeier• 8 years ago

FTA:

"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?"

JakeWesorick• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

That 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• 8 years ago

Understanding what the deal is starts with reading the article and not just the headline

iaw• 8 years ago

Fun fact: when a cylindrical shaped object fractures from a twisting stress it leaves 45 degree break patterns. Try it with a pencil.

SquirrelOnFire• 8 years ago

Depends on the material. Brittle materials will. Ductile materials tend to break on a 90 degree plane - https://goo.gl/images/QYMJmf

mygo• 8 years ago

what are you the hulk? I can’t twist a Ticonderoga

phyzome• 8 years ago

Ah, 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• 8 years ago

finally my code will be clean!

semi-extrinsic3• 8 years ago

I 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

Now I gotta explain to my wife why there are broken spaghettis.

sova• 8 years ago

I 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• 8 years ago

is that actually spaghetti though? it looks like linguine ...

nosefrog• 8 years ago

According to the article, the model doesn't apply to linguini, so I'm not surprised it doesn't always break into 3+ pieces.

semi-extrinsic3• 8 years ago

It's perfectly ordinary spaghetti (Barilla's no. 5 to be specific).

andrewflnr• 8 years ago

You 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.

semi-extrinsic3• 8 years ago

It's not that they're "cheating". It's just that many problems (like this one) are only difficult under some constraint. Lift that constraint, and it's easy (and therefore uninteresting).

I'm absolutely certain that Feynmann himself discovered the same thing as I did many decades ago, and that he discarded this "solution" because it was outside of the constraints that made the problem interesting.

tequila_shot• 8 years ago

After seeing this post, I dared my wife to do this. She simply applied stress carefully to spaghetti and broke it into two pieces.

coldtea• 8 years ago

I 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.

What's interesting is the exact way to achieve that. Unless someone knew that already...

TheRealPomax2• 8 years ago

Hm, 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• 8 years ago

Now if only someone could explain why toppled smokestacks break into three pieces, my life would be complete :-)

lurquer• 8 years ago

I've been trying this all night, and I can't get any of them to break. Maybe I overcooked it.

MIT mathematicians solve age-old spaghetti mystery

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