A new twist in the science of spaghetti

Here’s a puzzle to get you using your noodle: Is it possible to cleanly break dry spaghetti into two pieces?

Mathematicians at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have a solution, ending a mystery dating back to famous physicist Richard Feynman.

Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize in 1965, along with two other scientists

for their work in quantum electrodynamics, attempted to offer a theoretical reason why dry spaghetti noodles didn’t snap in two clean pieces. Instead, the noodles often broke into several fragments.

In 2006, a team of French physicists won the Ig Nobel Prize – awarded for unusual achievements in research – after discovering why pasta doesn’t cleanly break in two: the initial break creates a “snap back” effect, causing a vibration and additional breaks.

Can you actually break spaghetti cleanly into two pieces? MIT mathematicians say yes, but it requires a twist and a very specific tool.

To do this, MIT students Ronald Heisser and Vishal Patil created an apparatus that could bend and twist the dry noodles with enough force to break them cleanly into two pieces.

Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers said the study has a purpose beyond solving this pasta puzzle. It could help scientists understand how to control fractures in objects with rod-like shapes such as engineered nanotubes.

“It will be interesting to see whether and how twist could similarly be used to control the fracture dynamics of two-dimensional and three-dimensional materials,” Jorn Dunkel, associate professor of physical applied mathematics at MIT and co-author of the study, said in a statement. “In any case, this has been a fun interdisciplinary project started and carried out by two brilliant and persistent students – who probably don’t want to see, break or eat spaghetti for a while.”