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If this isn’t a question you’ve been pondering on pasta night, do a little experiment with me. Go to the kitchen, grab a piece of dried spaghetti and, one hand on each end, bend it until it breaks. If you thought it was going to snap into two clean pieces, and you’re halfway through the box and it still hasn’t happened yet, you’re not alone.
A piece of uncooked spaghetti rarely breaks in half, and usually breaks into three or more pieces instead, with several small pieces flying from the middle (my record is seven). Beyond puzzling the average person in the kitchen, the question of why and how this happens has kept (at least two) great scientific minds awake at night.
Fortunately for us, Doctors Basile Audoly and Sébastien Neukirch, both physicists from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, did a lot of work (and wasted a lot of noodles) to find an answer. Their research was published as “Fragmentation of Rods by Cascading Cracks: Why Spaghetti Does Not Break in Half,” in Physical Review Letters (Volume 95, No. 9, August 26, 2005), and won them the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize for Physics.
After breaking strand after strand of spaghetti (they used Barilla, in case you were wondering), taking high-speed images of the process and applying the Kirchhoff equation (which relates to how waves travel through an object that’s put under stress), they concluded that spaghetti fragmentation is caused by flexural waves traveling through the pasta after the initial break. Once the spaghetti is bent to a critical point, it breaks. This causes a flexural wave to travel down each of the resulting pieces before they have time to relax from the strain and straighten out. The wave causes these pieces curve more, which leads to more breaks.
Audoly and Neukirch refer to this whole ordeal as a “cascading failure mechanism,” which makes a night of snapping spaghetti sound pretty exciting.
Comments (12)
Comment
My question is,why don’t they make some shorter spaghetti for those of us who don’t want to have to break it in half?
posted by Sharon D on 5-18-2008 at 1:24 pm
My boyfriend and I have been at odds about this lately, since when I cook dinner I make a mess all over the kitchen with the flying pieces. He somehow gets the scraps to make it into the pot, as I sit there puzzled.
posted by cj on 5-18-2008 at 2:17 pm
My spaghetti always breaks in half. But I don’t hold it at the ends; I hold it near where I want it to break.
This drives my mother crazy. She uses a huge pot because she wants it unbroken.
posted by Miss Cellania on 5-18-2008 at 3:17 pm
cj, do you break it up or down, do you break it all at once or a small group at a time, how about him?
Or simply how high above the water do you break it?
I usually just drop it all in and wait until the bottom pieces are “soft” before pushing the top pieces under
posted by Kinglink on 5-18-2008 at 4:44 pm
I’m one of those people who a) get little spaghetti pieces everywhere when I try to break it, and b) get myself covered in sauce if I try to eat full-length noodles. My solution? I never make spaghetti, only farfalle (or other comes-in-small-pieces pasta).
posted by gibson8or on 5-18-2008 at 6:52 pm
Put your hands together on the spaghetti. The middle should be where your hands meet and brek toward the pot of hot water. Your spaghetti will be half every time.
posted by SCUBA on 5-19-2008 at 2:28 am
As Pierre and Marie roll over in their graves…..
Seriously?
Some of the greatest minds are studying…spaghetti breakage?
Fun post and all, but I hope this relates to something bigger than pasta! :D
posted by mrs.djs on 5-19-2008 at 10:24 am
I never break my spaghetti…I like it long, and I like it when it clumps together also.
posted by Reese on 5-19-2008 at 10:57 am
@ mrs. djs,
This experiment alone seems silly, but, hypothetically, it could be taken beyond pasta. What we’ve learned about failure mechanisms in spaghetti could also be applied to breakage in other long, brittle objects, like bridges and bones if someone picks up the torch and runs with it.
posted by Matt Soniak on 5-19-2008 at 11:16 am
Thanks Matt, that’s kind of what I was hoping for. :)
posted by mrs.djs on 5-19-2008 at 11:31 am
Spaghetti shouldn’t be broken in half strictly speaking. That’s not how the Itlians do it at least. You put the spaghetti in the pot vertically and as the bit in the water becomes pliable (a few seconds) the weight of the top part out of the water should submerge all the pasta… or you could push it in yourself.
posted by Matt on 5-21-2008 at 9:09 am
Good thinking, Matt, because I was amazed (and appalled) that this was something one could win a Nobel Prize for.
posted by D-chi on 5-31-2008 at 6:57 pm