Saturday, August 18, 2018
Proved something else
Via ScienceDaily, an IgNobelish experiment proving an interesting but useless point.
Can you break one rod of dry spaghetti into exactly two pieces? Apparently it's very difficult. The free ends after the first break still have plenty of momentum, and now they're free to overshoot and vibrate, which causes more breakage down the line. (Human analogy left as exercise for reader.)
Why useless? Nobody breaks one spaghetto. Real cooks break a bundle, which always breaks cleanly. Each stick is constrained by its neighbors, so there's no overshoot or resonance. (Human analogy left as exercise for reader.)
The more interesting (but still obvious) proof relates to the experimenters, not the experiment.
1. "So Heisser built a mechanical fracture device to controllably twist and bend sticks of spaghetti."
2. "In parallel, Patil began to develop a mathematical model to explain how twisting can snap a stick in two."
Heisser builds the machine, Patil builds the math.
Nuff said.
Labels: metametrology
¶ 7:20 AM
