Spaghetti-breaking mystery solved by two MIT students
Famous American physicist puzzled, but not this duo
A quick Google search of the current biggest mysteries in physics turns up a daunting list of questions: What exactly is dark matter? Why does time only move in one direction? What happens inside a black hole?
But sometimes, as American physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman discovered decades ago, equally vexing conundrums can be found in everyday objects — say, dry spaghetti noodles.
One night, while preparing one of his favorite meals with supercomputer pioneer Danny Hillis, Feynman noticed something strange about spaghetti. If a dry noodle is taken and broken in half, it will almost always break into three or more pieces, tiny bits spraying in every direction.
“Why is this true — why does it break into three pieces? We spent the next two hours coming up with crazy theories,” Hillis recalled in a biography about Feynman. But, after two hours, all the duo had were their theories — “no real good” ones, Hillis said, and a mess of broken spaghetti all over Feynman’s kitchen.
Decades later in the spring of 2015, two graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found themselves in an oddly similar situation — only, Ronald Heisser and his friend Edgar Gridello had been breaking spaghetti for much longer than two hours.
“For maybe a month, a month and a half, we would just break spaghetti after class, just cover the floor in broken pieces of spaghetti,” Heisser, now a PH.D. student at Cornell University, told The Washington Post last week. He and Gridello decided to take on Feynman’s spaghetti enigma as a final project for a class.
“I thought it would be cool to try to complete something that a famous physicist began,” Heisser said.
But Heisser and Gridello weren’t trying to figure out why dry spaghetti noodles don’t break in half cleanly. That mystery had already been cracked in 2005 by French scientists Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch, whose research earned them an Ig Nobel Prize, a parody award intended to “celebrate the unusual” and “honor the imaginative.”
The MIT students wanted to tackle a bigger question: Is it even possible to break a spaghetti noodle in two halves? Can it be done and, if so, how?
Turns out the answer is yes, with a twist. Literally.
Using mathematical modeling, a one-of-a-kind spaghetti-breaking contraption and a high-tech camera that can capture up to a million frames per second, Heisser, with the help of fellow MIT graduate student Vishal Patil, took what began as a class project and turned it into the latest revelation in Feynman’s famed puzzle. Heisser and Patil figured out that all you need to do to halve spaghetti is bend and twist, publishing their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
The twist is crucial, Patil told The Post. He created a mathematical model to explain the theory drawing on the research done by Audoly and Neukirch.
A decade ago, the French scientists discovered that when a long thin object is broken by applying pressure evenly to both ends, the force creates a “snap-back effect” — a wave of energy released from the initial break that causes other sections of the object to also fracture.
“In our study, we go a bit further and show that actually you can control this fracture cascade and get two pieces if you twist it,” Patil said. “You can control the fracture process and then you get two pieces instead of many, many pieces.”
By twisting and bending, the stress placed on the object being broken is distributed, Patil said. The “snapback effect” is weakened by the twist and the pasta unwinding itself releases energy, preventing more fractures, according to a news release from MIT.
As expected, testing the theory required breaking spaghetti — a lot of it.
Heisser said he thinks the number is north of 500. Patil recalled hours in the lab.
“We’d just be in lab breaking spaghetti all the time,” he said.
Luckily, instead of relying on bare hands and manual strength, Heisser designed a special device.