It’s a problem that had even physics genius and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman stumped - why does spaghetti break into three (or more) pieces when you snap it in half?

When a rod normally snaps, it’s a pretty simple process. The top of the material is in tension while the bottom is in compression, and when the tension along the top reaches the maximum allowable tensile stress, the rod fractures.

But spaghetti is different - instead of failure at just one point, there are multiple fractures along the plane, which send little shards of spaghetti flying all over the place. So what's going on?

If you’re now snapping some spaghetti at home while reading this (or have ever done so while cooking), you’ll realise that the break causes vibrations in your fingers. Feynman came up with a theory that these vibrations could sufficiently excite the remaining spaghetti to cause the secondary fracture.

To test this theory, he snapped spaghetti underwater, where the affects of vibration would be reduced. But surprisingly, the spaghetti still broke at more than one point, proving that vibration wasn't driving the strange fracture behaviour. In the decades since, many physicists have come up with theories about the problem, but it's still widely considered an unsolved mystery.

To try to figure out what’s happening, Destin from Smarter Every Day decided to film the process of snapping spaghetti at first 18,000, then 40,000 and then a ridiculously detailed 250,000 frames per second - as far as we’re aware, this is the slowest and most detailed footage ever recorded of the phenomenon.

And it’s fascinating. What it reveals is that the multiple breaks in spaghetti appear to be caused by a newly explored process known as cascading fractures. The maths on how these cascading fractures work is still being studied, but this may very well be the most detailed study of it captured on film so far.

This isn't the first time pasta has helped physicists work out complex processes either - earlier this month researchers created a new type of pasta to explain mysterious polymers and potentally even discover a new state of matter.

Watch the amazing video above to find out how cascading fractures work, and next time you snap spaghetti to put it in a pot, remember that you’re about to explore the very edge of scientific knowledge.

Source: Smarter Every Day