Take a spaghetti by the ends and fold it until it breaks. The challenge is to get it to break into two pieces. What is impossible? Every time you try, the flexed spaghetti has the annoying quirk of blowing up into three or more chunks !
The Nobel Prize in Physics Richard Feynman (1918-1988), after spending many hours breaking spaghetti? And the coconut ?, did not find a convincing answer to this enigma. Two articles in the prestigious Physical Review Letters in 2005 solved it. In the works, the French Sébastien Neukirch, from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie; and Basile Audoly, from the CNRS, both from Paris, explained that after the first breakage of this paste, bending waves are generated that are amplified and further increase the curvature of one of the pieces, which breaks again .
