How to break spaghetti
November 8th, 2006 by SplineGuy
Now, I imagine that there are at least a few readers out there that are fans of the Numb3rs television series. For those of you that are not, why not? It’s an excellent series with great story lines. And, of course, best of all, you get suspense, drama, and applications of mathematics all rolled up into one. Plus, you don’t have to be a mathematician to appreciate the application of the mathematics. I love the fact that the times when Charlie is explaining his models, he makes an excellent effort in drawing analogy to everyday circumstances. I’ll even confess to having a good portion of the theories he mentions float over my head. Sure, I look them up afterward and get a handle on them at least at an introductory level, but there are plenty of things that come up that I’ve never heard of before.
Just to mention one, at the end of the most recent episode, Charlie pointed out that it is impossible to bend a piece of spaghetti to the point of breaking and have it break into only two pieces. It’s related to an area of study called fragmentation theory. Apparently, Nobel prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman spent an entire evening with a friend of his, supercomputing innovator W. Daniel Hillis, breaking spaghetti trying to explain why this is true. At the end of the night, they couldn’t reach a conclusion.
From an article on Science News Online
“We ended up, at the end of a couple of hours, with broken spaghetti all over the kitchen and no real good theory about why spaghetti breaks in three,” Hillis recalls, as quoted in the book No Ordinary Genius by Christopher Sykes (1994, W.W. Norton).
Sometimes, such experiments turn out to be not so silly after all. Recently, French scientists who unwittingly followed in the footsteps of Hillis and Feynman, who died in 1988, finally solved the spaghetti mystery. And a group of physicists and mathematicians conducted a related study that transcends spaghetti. The team examined various kinds of brittle rods under circumstances quite different from ordinary bending.
Besides explaining a quirk of everyday life, the new studies are improving scientists’ grasp of fragmentation—the process by which objects shatter. “Fragmentation is a complicated problem that we still don’t understand very well,” says mechanical engineer and materials scientist Kaliat T. Ramesh of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “Most of us are trying to understand the basic mechanisms involved.”
Because spaghetti rods are similar in some ways to a wide variety of brittle objects ranging from industrial cutting tools to body armor, the research may end up elucidating how such structures can fracture and fail. “If we understand how things break, we can build tougher structures,” says mathematician Andrew L. Belmonte of Pennsylvania State University in State College.
Read more here: That’s the Way the Spaghetti Crumbles
By the way, Numb3rs comes on CBS on Friday nights.
