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This is Scientific Americans' 60- Science. I'm Karen Hopkin.

Physicists concern themselves with problems that are profound, the origins of the universe,

the nature of time, the composition of matter, and then there's spaghetti.

A pasta problem has perplexed physicists as celebrated as Richard Feynman and has even been

awarded an Ig Nobel Prize. At issue, why spaghetti doesn't break into two pieces, why it breaks

into three pieces or more. Ronald Heiser, now a grad student at Cornell, decided to explore

the misbehavior of spaghetti for an undergraduate math course he took at MIT.

Now, you may never have noticed it, but it's nearly impossible to break a single, dry piece of

spaghetti in half. Feynman allegedly noodled with the puzzle, and Heiser became similarly possessed.

I'm a little bit of a contrarian person, so I thought it would be fun to try and

break it into two, because no one said you couldn't do that. They just said why it doesn't break

into two. In fact, the French researchers, who were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in 2006,

found that when spaghetti is bent evenly from both ends, it will crack near the center, where the

stick is most curved. But this initial break sets up a vibrational wave that quickly fractures the rod

further, so you get multiple fragments. What Heiser wondered was whether he could somehow get

around this vibrational snapback effect, and he found you have to do the twist.

Heiser built a device for torquing his pasta with precision, and he observed the resulting

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