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Comment by semi-extrinsic | Hacker News Reader

I don't get how this is an interesting result. When you are allowed to change the applied stress (not just simple bending), getting it to break into just two pieces is easy.

By holding the spaghetti with two fingers at each end and applying compression together with bending, i.e. making the spaghetti look kinda like a sine wave from bottom to bottom, I can break spaghettis into just two pieces with success rate well above 50%. And I have confirmed with simple bending of shorter spaghettis that it's not just because of a shorter effective length.

Here's a picture of five spaghettis broken into just two pieces, along with one unbroken for comparison:

https://imgur.com/a/gOTiHG3

Now I gotta explain to my wife why there are broken spaghettis.

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You make it sound like "changing the applied stress" is cheating, like they're equivocating on the problem. But the problem is just breaking spaghetti with your hand, by any means necessary for providing good entertainment. And challenging the unstated assumptions of a problem is often the most interesting way to solve it.

Anyway, sounds like it was interesting enough to make you do a bunch of experiments.

It's not that they're "cheating". It's just that many problems (like this one) are only difficult under some constraint. Lift that constraint, and it's easy (and therefore uninteresting).

I'm absolutely certain that Feynmann himself discovered the same thing as I did many decades ago, and that he discarded this "solution" because it was outside of the constraints that made the problem interesting.

is that actually spaghetti though? it looks like linguine ...

According to the article, the model doesn't apply to linguini, so I'm not surprised it doesn't always break into 3+ pieces.

It's perfectly ordinary spaghetti (Barilla's no. 5 to be specific).

After seeing this post, I dared my wife to do this. She simply applied stress carefully to spaghetti and broke it into two pieces.

>I don't get how this is an interesting result. When you are allowed to change the applied stress (not just simple bending), getting it to break into just two pieces is easy.

What's interesting is the exact way to achieve that. Unless someone knew that already...

I find it more interesting that the casual behavior is to break into multiple pieces. Twisting is a neat way to add more input into a very simple system.

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