MIT students crack case of spaghetti noodles — with a twist

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 PhD student at Cornell University, told The Washington Post. He and Gridello had decided to take on Feynman’s spaghetti enigma as a final project for a class. “I thought it would be cool to try and 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 said. 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 “snap-back effect” is weakened by the twist and the pasta unwinding itself releases energy, preventing MIT students devised a contraption to test their theory that spaghetti noodles could be broken in half evenly.

more fractures, according to a news release from MIT.

As expected, testing the theory required breaking spaghetti — a lot of it

, but instead of relying on bare hands and manual strength, Heisser designed a special device. “The way our contraption worked is you had sort of a clamp where you clamp the ends of spaghetti,” Patil said. “You have to clamp it hard enough, so you could twist the spaghetti a lot, but softly enough that it wouldn’t just break at the ends.” As one clamp rotates to

twist the spaghetti, the other clamp slides toward it to bring the two ends together, bending it.

Finally, after several years of research, Heisser and Patil arrived at a conclusion: A dry noodle needed to be twisted nearly 360 degrees and bent slowly to achieve a clean break, the MIT release said.

While breaking spaghetti may seem frivolous, Patil said the research may be applicable to studying how fracturing, usually a “chaotic and random” process, can be controlled for a wide variety of materials.

MIT