Slashdot Mirror
Mathematicians Solve Age-Old Spaghetti Mystery (sciencedaily.com)
If you happen to have a box of spaghetti in your pantry, try this experiment: Pull out a single spaghetti stick and hold it at both ends. Now bend it until it breaks. How many fragments did you make? If the answer is three or more, pull out another stick and try again. Can you break the noodle in two? If not, you're in very good company. From a report: The spaghetti challenge has flummoxed even the likes of famed physicist Richard Feynman '39, who once spent a good portion of an evening breaking pasta and looking for a theoretical explanation for why the sticks refused to snap in two. 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?
The answer, according to a new MIT study, is yes -- with a twist. In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers report that they have found a way to break spaghetti in two, by both bending and twisting the dry noodles. They carried out experiments with hundreds of spaghetti sticks, bending and twisting them with an apparatus they built specifically for the task. The team found that if a stick is twisted past a certain critical degree, then slowly bent in half, it will, against all odds, break in two. The researchers say the results may have applications beyond culinary curiosities, such as enhancing the understanding of crack formation and how to control fractures in other rod-like materials such as multifiber structures, engineered nanotubes, or even microtubules in cells.
The answer, according to a new MIT study, is yes -- with a twist. In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers report that they have found a way to break spaghetti in two, by both bending and twisting the dry noodles. They carried out experiments with hundreds of spaghetti sticks, bending and twisting them with an apparatus they built specifically for the task. The team found that if a stick is twisted past a certain critical degree, then slowly bent in half, it will, against all odds, break in two. The researchers say the results may have applications beyond culinary curiosities, such as enhancing the understanding of crack formation and how to control fractures in other rod-like materials such as multifiber structures, engineered nanotubes, or even microtubules in cells.
The link doesn't even go to the right journal - it goes to a paper in Nature when it says it is a PNAS paper - and the paper doesn't have anything to do with bending any kind of rod. The correct paper is Controlling fracture cascades through twisting and quenching.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Did they try doing it underwater, or burying it in sand? That might damp the wave.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Smarter Every Day covered spaghetti snapping into 3 pieces. Had to go all the way up to 250,000 fps to see what was happening.
Real people roll their own.
Dough you knot understand?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I always get two perfect halves when I do the following - it's easy.
1) bind the spaghetti together into a tight bundle, using a couple rubber bands. Be sure both rubber bands are fairly close to the center of the bundle.
2) Run the bundle through a band saw.
#DeleteChrome
Sigh.
Allow me to explain once again.
Intellectual puzzles like this lead to real-world mathematics that gets incorporated into huge things like engineering tables and safety laws, that translate to real-world buildings, runways, etc. that "work better" in some fashion than they otherwise would.
Why does a material, under stress, fracture elsewhere than the stress point? That seems to me to be an incredibly important thing to understand, especially if you're putting your main masses on those secondary/tertiary snapping points "because you don't want to put it all in the middle".
Maths, pure maths, is called pure for a reason and doesn't have an immediate "point". But it underlies every single thing you ever do because it underlies computer science, physics, chemistry, engineering and all kinds of other disciplines which use the findings of pure maths in their calculations for applied maths.
"What good is calculus, it's just areas under a graph!" is the kind of fucking stupidity that you get from such people, not realising just how much that simple concept underlies everything you touch, from power through a cable over time to how to calculate volumes of large objects, to everything imaginable - weather forecasting, stress-measurement on moving parts, etc etc.