spaghetti

If you take a dry piece of spaghetti and bend it until it breaks you’ll find that it always breaks into three or more pieces instead of the expected two pieces. Exactly why this happens has challenged many scientists, including famed physicist Richard Feynman, for years. Feynman, a brilliant scientist who is best known for his work on the Manhattan Project, was stumped by the phenomenon and at a loss to explain it.

Check out this really cool video from SmarterEveryDay that explains how scientists were able solve the decades-long question. They used super high speed cameras to explore how spaghetti breaks frame by frame. While we also have a really cool tool to simultaneously capture these force curves with high definition video (SMS’ video capture system), it is nowhere near as powerful as the tools that were needed to solve this whimsical “why spaghetti breaks” question.

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