Mon, 22 Aug 2005
How Spaghetti Breaks
Some researchers in France figured out why, when a piece of spaghetti is bent, it breaks into multiple pieces, rather than just breaking in half. They have a number of videos of their experiments. They found that even releasing one end of a bent piece of spaghetti can cause it to break.
The multiple breaking of bent rods, like dry spaghetti pasta, can then be understood as a cascade of releases (loss of cohesion upon breakings) followed by stress increases leading to new cracks.
