In the pic below, the most exclusive, brainy and unorthodox catering equipment ever created.
Briefly said: it is a machine for breaking spaghetti into two parts.
Maybe you need a little more context here …
Trying as much as possible to avoid digressions, it all started one evening a few decades ago, when Richard Feynman, world-famous physicist and one of the best minds of the twentieth century, realized that it was impossible to break a raw spaghetti into two parts by holding it by the two ends.
All the “experiments” had resulted in the spaghetti breaking into three or more parts.
But why?
Well, two French researchers arrived there decades later (Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch).
They explained, in their paper “Fragmentation of rods by cascading cracks: why spaghetti does not break in half“, how, in their own words: “the sudden relaxation of the curvature at this end leads to a burst of flexural waves (…). These flexural waves locally increase the curvature in the rod, and we argue that this counterintuitive mechanism is responsible for the fragmentation of brittle rods under bending“.
So is it really impossible to break spaghetti into two parts? Do we really give up like this?
Hell, no!
A few years later at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the scholars Ronald Heisser and Vishal Patil found that if a stick is twisted past a certain critical degree, then slowly bent in half, it will (hold your hats) break in two.
Said and done! The researchers, supported by a whole team, designed and produced an apparatus capable of “twisting the spaghetti 270 degrees, then bending the ends together at a speed of 3 millimetres per second“.
…and puff! The spaghetti rod is broken in two half.
I don’t know if said “spaghetti-breaker” is on sale.
But, in case you’re more interested in cooking pasta rather than breaking it, I can provide you with the right equipment.
