By Peter Weiss
Great scientists sometimes do silly experiments. The renowned physicist and Nobel prize winner Richard P. Feynman, for instance, once got it into his head to figure out why uncooked spaghetti doesn’t snap neatly in two when you bend it far enough to break. Pay attention next time, and you’ll notice that the pasta tends to shatter into three or more fragments of unequal lengths.
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In the midst of making a spaghetti dinner for themselves one night about 20 years ago, Feynman and a friend—supercomputing innovator W. Daniel Hillis—launched into a brief investigation of this perplexing breaking-pasta performance. “We ended up, at the end of a couple of hours, with broken spaghetti all over the kitchen and no real good theory about why spaghetti breaks in three,” Hillis recalls, as quoted in the book No Ordinary Genius by Christopher Sykes (1994, W.W. Norton).