[extropy-chat] Pasta all fisica

[Amara Graps]

The Aug 11th 2005 Edition of The Economist carries a charming article
about this problem: "Why does spaghetti always break into three or more
pieces?

Materials science
Pasta alla fisica  (premium content)


http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4269826

"IT WAS a problem that baffled the master himself. Richard
Feynman-maverick physics genius, Nobel laureate and father of modern
quantum theory-could not work out why, when a strand of dried spaghetti
is snapped, it almost never breaks in half but instead fragments into
three or more pieces. At dinner with Daniel Hillis, an old friend and
computer scientist, the two became obsessed with this and spent hours
theorising and experimenting. In the end, they left with a kitchen full
of pulverised pasta and no reasonable answer."

The article goes to say that

"The answer was found by Basile Audoly and Sébastien Neukirch of the
University of Paris VI who use something called flexural waves. Each
time part of a bent strand breaks, a series of these waves ripples down
the length of the pasta. The mistake Feynman probably made was to assume
that the strain released when a bent strand breaks allows the two
half-strands to relax and become straight again. Instead, according to
their equations, the passing waves cause parts of the daughter strands
to curve even further. This triggers other breakages which, in turn,
trigger further waves, causing the strand to fragment."
[Read the article for more.]

You can see movies of their experiment here and read papers here:

http://www.lmm.jussieu.fr/spaghetti/

Amara  :-)

[her own colored spaghetti :
http://www.mpi-hd.mpg.de/dustgroup/~graps/spaghetti/ ]

-- 

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Amara Graps, PhD          email: amara at amara.com
Computational Physics     vita:  ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt
Multiplex Answers         URL:   http://www.amara.com/
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"Everything you see I owe to spaghetti."  --Sophia Loren, actress