Physicists concern themselves with problems that are profound. The origins of the universe, the nature of time, the composition of matter. And then, there's spaghetti. A spaghetti problem has puzzled physicists as famous as Richard Feynman, and he has even been awarded an Ig Nobel Prize. At issue—"Why spaghetti doesn't break into two pieces. Why it breaks into three pieces or more. "
Ronald Heisser, now a graduate student at Cornell, decided to explore the misbehavior of spaghetti for an undergraduate math course he took at MIT.
Now, you may never have noticed it, but it's nearly impossible to break a single, dry piece of spaghetti in half. It is claimed that Feynman noodled with the puzzle. And Heisser became similarly possessed.
"I'm a little bit of a contrarian person. So I thought it would be fun to try and break it into two. No one said you couldn't do that. They just said why it doesn't break into two. "
In fact, the French researchers who were awarded the Ig Nobel prize in 2006 found that when spaghetti is bent evenly from both ends it will crack near the center, where the stick is most curved. But this initial break sets up a vibrational wave(震动波) that quickly breaks the stick further. So you get multiple fragments (碎片).
What Heisser wondered was whether he could somehow get around this vibrational" snapback" effect. And he found you have to do the twist. Heisser built a device for torqueing(转矩) his spaghetti with precision and he observed the resulting fragmentation with a high-speed camera. He discovered that introducing a twist of around 360 degrees to the long strand allowed him to produce the desired single pair of spaghetti pieces.
Although the project was a bit of fun I think it's quite nice when you can find interesting physics and maths hiding behind everyday, sort of boring objects, " said Ronald Heisser.
