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iMechanica Video: Why spaghetti never snaps in half? 130,000 fps slow mo video reveals
Challenge yourself to snap a spaghetti stick in half by bending two ends. It always snaps into three or more pieces, but not two. But why? Indeed this phenomenon has puzzled many people, including the great Richard Feynman, for many years. The puzzle was only solved in recent years. Slow mo videos by ultrahigh speed camera reveal why. Check out this iMechanica Video with 6+ million view on YouTube.
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There is a solution to this challenge, but with a twist
In 2005, two french researchers Sebastien Neukirch and Basile Audoly explained in a PRL paper that when you bend a spaghetti stick, a vibration wave sets off from the top of the curved spaghetti throughout the rest of the stick. This “snap-back” vibration leads to the fragmentations. They later even won an Ig Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006.
In 2018, a group of researchers at MIT reported in PNAS that, by twisting the spaghetti stick really hard while bending it, one can break the stick in two halves.
I tried many times to test out the twist+bending approach in my kitchen but never succeeded to snap a spaghetti stick in half. It always snaps into at least 3 pieces. Did anyone get luck?
Another type of spaghetti
This is rare, but when pole vault athletes break their pole, they always snap in more than two pieces, e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yCnPgD4YZg