Feynman's Age-old Spaghetti Dilemma: Why can't spaghetti be snapped in half?

Richard Feynman is a world renowned theoretical physicist, celebrated for his reworking of quantum electrodynamics and the development of Feynman diagrams (Chiu, 2016). However, an ordinary stick of spaghetti seemed to have left him and decades of other physicists flummoxed, as they searched for an explanation for why spaghetti never seemed to break in two. 

Discovery of the Problem: Feynman and Hilis’ Spaghetti Dilemma

Feynman’s Spaghetti Dilemma began one evening while preparing dinner with supercomputer pioneer Danny Hillis (Chiu, 2016). They noticed that whenever dried spaghetti was broken, it always seemed to break into three pieces instead of two. The two brilliant minds then spent the rest of the evening collaborating, attempting to piece together a plausible theory for this peculiar phenomenon. However, after two hours and a mess of broken spaghetti, the duo was unable to come up with a good theory. 

Introduction of an Explanation: Audoly and Neukirch’s Ig Nobel Prize

In 2006, Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch found an explanation for this peculiar behaviour of spaghetti and shared the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded for research that first “makes people laugh, and then think.” (Chu, 2018). They discovered that when a long and thin object like spaghetti is broken by attempting to snap it in half, the energy of the initial fracture propagates back through the stick, causing the stick to fracture in multiple places. This theory seemed to solve Feynman’s puzzle, however the question still remains of whether spaghetti could be coerced into snapping in half. 

Breaking of the “Rule”: MIT Mathematician’s Broken-in-half Spaghetti

In 2015, two MIT graduate students Ronald Heisser and Edgar Gridello finally cracked the puzzle of how to break spaghetti in half (Lincoln, 2018). Hundreds of experiments were carried out bending and twisting spaghetti sticks with an apparatus built specifically for the task. It was discovered that if a stick of spaghetti is twisted past a certain degree before being bent in half, it will finally break in two. 

References:

Chiu, A. (2016). This spaghetti-breaking problem stumped physicist Richard Feynman. Two MIT students have now solved it. Washington Post. [online] 16 Aug. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/08/16/this-spaghetti-breaking-problem-stumped-physicist-richard-feynman-two-mit-students-have-now-solved-it/ [Accessed 25 Dec. 2024].

Chu, J. (2018). MIT mathematicians solve age-old spaghetti mystery. [online] MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Available at: https://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-mathematicians-solve-age-old-spaghetti-mystery-0813 [Accessed 25 Dec. 2024].

Lincoln, D. (2018). Spaghetti mystery that stumped famous physicist is finally solved. [online] CNN. Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/25/opinions/spaghetti-mystery-feynman-lincoln/index.html [Accessed 25 Dec. 2024].