This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkins.

Physicists concern themselves with problems that are profound.

The origins of the universe, the nature of time, the composition of matter, and then

their 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 snap back 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

fragmentation with a high-speed camera. He discovered that introducing a twist of around 360 degrees to the long strand allowed him to produce the desired

single pair of pasta pieces. That's where Vishal Patal, a grad student in mathematics at MIT, comes in.

...