Spaghetti Mystery is Finally Solved

It is a long drawn fact that it is almost impossible to break a dry spaghetti noodle into two pieces. To solve this mystery, MIT researchers undertook the task of conducting experiments with 100s of Spaghetti sticks by bending and twisting them.

The team of researchers decoded that in order to break the spaghetti noodle into two pieces one needs to twist the spaghetti stick at a certain critical degree. Although this research may not look like very useful but came out to be a hack in certain areas. It was interesting to experience as how and whether twist could equally be used to control the fracture of dynamics of two and three dimensional material. The researchers stated that apart from having culinary applications this research may also help in increasing the understanding of crack formation and may help in controlling factures in other rod like material such as multi-fiber structures, engineered Nano tubes or even micro tubules in cells. The credit of this research goes to two brilliant and persistent students namely Ronald Heisser, a graduate student at the University of Cornell and another Vishal Patil, a mathematics graduate student at MIT. Mathematics instructor at MIT, Norbert Stoop and Emmanuel Villermaux of Universite Aix Marseille acted as co-authors in this research. In order to conduct this research Heisser built a mechanical fractured device capable of twisting and bending sticks of spaghetti. Heisser and Patil then used the device to bend and twist 100s of spaghetti sticks and recorded this fragmentation process with the help of a camera. Simultaneously Patil developed a mathematical model that could explain that how twisting a stick can snap it into two pieces. At the end the team concluded that the theoretical predictions of when a thin stick would break into two pieces versus 3 or 4 matched with their experimental observations. They also made some tests manually and tried various articles and finally reached a conclusion that at a point when the spaghetti was twisted really hard and thereafter brought both the ends together, it looked to work and it finally broken into two pieces. They find out that once the spaghetti breaks, you are left with a snap back because the main rod wanted to be straight. But snap back doesn’t want itself to be twisted too. Finally the mystery was solved.

By: Anuja Arora

Content: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180813160537.htm