{"id":4199,"date":"2022-04-04T17:35:42","date_gmt":"2022-04-04T15:35:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.virdex.it\/2022\/04\/04\/the-spaghetti-breaker\/"},"modified":"2022-04-04T17:35:42","modified_gmt":"2022-04-04T15:35:42","slug":"the-spaghetti-breaker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.virdex.it\/en\/2022\/04\/04\/the-spaghetti-breaker\/","title":{"rendered":"The Spaghetti-Breaker"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wpb-content-wrapper\"><p>[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text text_larger=&#8221;no&#8221;]In the pic below, the most exclusive, brainy and unorthodox catering equipment ever created.<\/p>\n<p>Briefly said: it is a <strong>machine for breaking spaghetti into two parts<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe you need a little more context here &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Trying as much as possible to avoid digressions, it all started one evening a few decades ago, when <em>Richard Feynman<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n<p>All the &#8220;experiments&#8221; had resulted in the spaghetti breaking into three or more parts.<\/p>\n<p>But why?<\/p>\n<p>Well, two French researchers arrived there decades later (<em>Basile Audoly<\/em> and <em>Sebastien Neukirch<\/em>).<br \/>\nThey explained, in their paper &#8220;<em>Fragmentation of rods by cascading cracks: why spaghetti does not break in half<\/em>&#8220;, how, in their own words: &#8220;<em>the sudden relaxation of the curvature at this end leads to a burst of flexural waves<\/em> (&#8230;). <em>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<\/em>&#8220;.<\/p>\n<p>So is it really impossible to break spaghetti into two parts? Do we really give up like this?<br \/>\nHell, no!<\/p>\n<p>A few years later at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the scholars <em>Ronald Heisser<\/em> and <em>Vishal Patil<\/em> found that if a stick is twisted past a certain critical degree, then slowly bent in half, it will (hold your hats) <strong>break in two<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Said and done! The researchers, supported by a whole team, designed and produced an apparatus capable of &#8220;<em>twisting the spaghetti 270 degrees, then bending the ends together at a speed of 3 millimetres per second<\/em>&#8220;.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;and puff! The spaghetti rod is broken in two half.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know if said &#8220;<em>spaghetti-breaker<\/em>&#8221; is on sale.<\/p>\n<p>But, in case you&#8217;re more interested in cooking pasta rather than breaking it, I can provide you with the right equipment.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text text_larger=&#8221;no&#8221;]In the pic below, the most exclusive, brainy and unorthodox catering equipment ever created. Briefly said: it is a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.virdex.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.virdex.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.virdex.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.virdex.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.virdex.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.virdex.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4199\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.virdex.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.virdex.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.virdex.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}