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Pasta purists insist on plonking dry spaghetti into the boiling pot whole, but should you rebel against convention and try to break the strands in half, you'll probably end up with a mess of scattered pieces.
[...] It wasn't until 2006 that a pair of French physicists successfully explained the dynamics at work and solved the mystery. They found that, counterintuitively, a spaghetti strand produces a "kick back" traveling wave as it breaks. This wave temporarily increases the curvature in other sections, leading to many more breaks.
[...] This isn't just fun and games for the sake of idle curiosity (not that there's anything wrong with that). A collaboration between Audoly and Columbia University computer scientist Eitan Grinspun led to developing an Adobe paint brush that bends and moves, introduced in Adobe Illustrator 5 and Adobe Paint Brush 5. The MIT scientists say their new work could be used to better understand how cracks form and spread in similarly structured materials and brittle structures—bridge spans, for instance, or human bones. The secret could lie in the pasta.
Source: MIT scientists crack the case of breaking spaghetti in two
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday August 17 2018, @05:07AM (7 children)
I knew him at Caltech. Not well but he and I spent quite a lot of time discussing thought experiments.
Just after World War II he was quite burnt out so he scouted around for something easier on the brain than making atom bombs work on the very first try. At first he was going to derive the shape of the column of water pouring out of a spigot, but upon discovering that was a solved problem, he went on to beat the subject of spinning plates completely to death.
As I went on with my Physics studies, sometimes I would puzzle over just _why_ some physicists would choose to research everyday phenomena. Because they can't get time on a particle accellerator? That funding agencies resent that he slept with all their daughters?
No.
It happens all the time that everyday phenomena are governed by truly novel Physics. From my own personal standpoint that's not really true, in that _every_ phenomenon can at least conceivably be derived from First Principles - General Relativity and until recently the Standard Model.
"conceivably". But not in a way anyone could ever hope to derive.
No, Feynman worked out the physics of spinning plates, and this Total Surfer Dude of a UCSC Physics Professor was so very heavily into water wave physics because such inquiries yield new equations whose solutions all by themselves advance the field as a whole.
That leads me to suggest you give it a try yourself. You do NOT need to be affiliated with any institution - higher education or otherwise - to get published in any truly rational journal.
Look around your everyday world until you find something that you can't explain, do what it takes to explain it then publish your results.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Funny) by c0lo on Friday August 17 2018, @11:05AM (4 children)
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 17 2018, @11:54AM
> Fucking magnets, how do they work?
This special kind of magnet requires hormones to work.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday August 17 2018, @08:47PM (2 children)
I think the magnet reference is from a relatively well-known published work from J. and Dope, 2009.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday August 18 2018, @09:02AM (1 child)
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22j.+and+dope%22+2009 [google.com]
There's not just one hit that could possibly capture the true significance of J. and Dope.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by requerdanos on Saturday August 18 2018, @03:24PM
Here is a link that's a little clearer, for those who want to peruse the work in question:
https://youtu.be/8GyVx28R9-s?t=1m44s [youtu.be]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fritsd on Friday August 17 2018, @02:17PM (1 child)
There's a series of 3 books, "de natuurkunde van 't vrije veld" [wikipedia.org] (in Dutch) where everyday as well as rare weather phenomena are studied and explained, especially rainbows and such.
Unfortunately the author, Marcel Minnaert, managed to oscillate between fascist politics and communist politics at exactly the wrong time during and between the world wars,
so that he was persona non grata and in jail most of the time. He was lucky not to be executed by the Nazis during WWII, but afterwards he was too left-wing for the Dutch US-loving government during the Cold War, and moved back to Belgium.
I guess my school was fortunate to have his books in the dustier shelves of the school library :-)
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday August 18 2018, @09:08AM
... Concord California public library back around 1974. It was fascinating.
For example it's easy to demonstrate that small bubbles _always_ have higher pressure than large bubbles!
Prepare a metal tube with an air valve in the middle. On each side of the valve is a tee that enables you to blow bubbles on each end. Each tee also has a valve on its stem so you can shut it after bubble inflation.
Open the middle valve. Voila!
The small bubble empties in the big one! How cool is that?
The whole book is like that. Quite a lot of it is explained with real experiments that schoolchildren can actualy do _themselves_.
A while back I used the library's online catalog to search for it but I don't think they have it anymore. That's a damn shame. Perhaps I can find it on Alibris, or through a rare books dealer.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]