a puzzle richard feyman could not figure out

[Yoga Face]

feyman (one of the most brilliant minds of our day) loved spaghetti

when he broke a dry piece of spaghetti he noticed it always breaks into three pieces

he tried to break it under water, over an edge etc for hours but it always broke into three pieces and he could not figure out why




so, what is the solution ?

 

[Hangman]

http://plus.maths.org/content/spaghetti-breakthrough

 

[Viggo Rasmussen]

I pasta problem on to Luigi to figure out.

 

[Yoga Face]

http://plus.maths.org/content/spaghetti-breakthrough

without looking it up i thought it would be the swaying back and forth of the spagetti after snapping along with internal vibrations that would cause more breakage along fractures causedby the first bending


turns out the answer is more elegant


To model the breaking spaghetti, they used a differential equation that was first developed by Gustav Kirchhoff in 1850. The unknown quantity in this equation is the curvature of the two halves of the piece after the initial snap. When they solved it, Audoly and Neukirch found that rather than decreasing and eventually settling down to zero, the curvature actually increased in some parts of the two halves, causing further breakages at weak points. These snaps in turn sent out their own waves, starting a chain reaction that led to a whole avalanche of breakages