How come it’s so hard to break a piece of dry spaghetti in two?
How come it’s so hard to break a piece of dry spaghetti in two? Why does it break into more pieces? Also, when you slurp up a strand of cooked spaghetti, why does the pasta sauce fly off? asks a reader.
Spaghetti cooking
Before you is a pile of dry spaghetti. Your job, should you decide to accept it, is to break each piece in half, so that the pasta fits easily into a small saucepan. Ready, set, snap…Oops. What should be a snap is actually frustratingly difficult, as tiny, broken bits of pasta litter the table.
Scientists tried to solve the broken pasta problem for years. Most famously, the late physicist (and Nobel Prize winner) Richard Feynman spent an evening with friend (and supercomputer expert) W. Daniel Hillis, snapping spaghetti. At the end of the night, there was a pile of broken spaghetti, but no satisfying theory.
But in 2005, two physicists in Paris may have solved the spaghetti puzzle. The scientists took high-speed images of breaking spaghetti, and applied a mathematical equation describing how waves travel through a stressed object. What they found: As a piece of spaghetti is bent until it can curve no longer, it breaks. The sudden release causes a burst of “flexural waves” to travel through the remaining pieces, causing them to curve sharply, too — leading to more breaking.
So in a split second, your pasta breaks into three or four pieces, instead of neatly in two. (Watch dry spaghetti bend and fragment at www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GutricnMNc.)
Once you’ve cooked your broken (or intact) spaghetti and added sauce, you may be in the mood for slurping. But while it’s fun to hoover up strands of spaghetti, you could find the tablecloth–and everyone around you–covered in a fine spray of crushed tomatoes.
How come? According to physicist Jearl Walker, of Cleveland State University, the culprit is…wait for it…the Spaghetti Effect. It turns out that the Spaghetti Effect doesn’t just apply to pasta drawn into your mouth, but also to paper, metal, and other materials pulled into machinery.
Walker says that when a spaghetti strand is lifted from your plate, it already has some sideways swinging motion. As you suck up the spaghetti, you leave less and less of the strand hanging free. So the energy of motion–the kinetic energy of the strand — is concentrated in a smaller and smaller piece of strand. Just before the strand disappears into your mouth, its sideways motion becomes violent enough to fling sauce across the table.
You can also see the Spaghetti Effect in action between meals, whenever you use the vacuum cleaner. After you’re finished sweeping the living room, unplug the vacuum and press the cord rewind button. As the spaghetti-like cord is sucked quickly into the base, it may begin to whip around, turning the metal-tipped plug into a moving hazard. The solution: Retract the cord slowly, with several gentle pushes of the button. (And if you must slurp pasta, try to do it in slow motion.)
