As an avid amateur cook it has long troubled me that when breaking spaghetti it rarely breaks into just two pieces; more often than not it’s 3, 4, or more.
While some may mock this concern as needlessly elevated, believing that the only obvious impact is some minor loss of control resulting in spaghetti fragments flying all over the place, there is in fact more to it.
In its never-ending quest to solve the mysteries of the universe, physicists have settled one of science’s more perplexing enigmas by explaining why uncooked spaghetti breaks into more than two pieces when you bend it [1]. Essentially what happens is that the initial break causes waves to travel down the spaghetti resulting in other breaks.
So what does it mean? “If you can understand how spaghetti breaks you can understand how anything else breaks including a building an aeroplane or a car,” says Rod Cross, Professor of physics at the University of Sydney.
[Tick] Another problem solved.
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