Re: Breaking sticks or spaghetti

[herbgottlieb@juno.com (Herbert H. Gottlieb)]

 JBRAUNSDORF@delphi.com wrote:
> > When one takes a light stick or a piece of uncooked spaghetti and 
> holds it near  the ends and flexes it it sometimes does not break into
two pieces 
> but into  three.  You end up with one piece in each hand and a short
middle 
> section  which flies off as a projectile.
>
> In the most recent of the NOVA episodes that cover Feynman, the 
> founder of Thinking Machines Corp. (whose name I forget) illustrates
Feynman's
> undying curiousity about nature with exactly that problem. The two of 
> them were making a spaghetti dinner, and observed just what Jim
describes.
> They spent the rest of the evening making models and testing them.
> However, he doesn't say what they concluded!
One of my students once noticed a burned section on a panel board where a
small length of fuse wire had exploded when an electric circuit was
accidently shorted.  He created more of these fuse wire explosions and
analyzed the burn patterns that they produced. He then described how
similar events in outer space could explain 
some of the observations made by astronomers.  That year, his project was
one of the top winners of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.
However I have not heard from him since then.

Herb Gottlieb from New York City
(Wheree we are still waiting to hear from our former student Steve Shore)

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