For many scientists, there’s something about spaghetti that verges on the sublime. It’s not just the fact that it can be made from only two ingredients, or that it retains its form when cooked, or even that sauce adheres perfectly to its rough surface. As well as being the archetypal form of pasta, spaghetti is unusually prominent in the study of matter, suggesting that it offers physicists a window into how the universe works.   

Dried spaghetti is both stiff and slightly flexible, capable of being made quite thick (spaghettoni) or very thin (spaghettini), and this variety of physical traits means it behaves in illuminating, sometimes surprising ways. On one famous evening, idiosyncratic Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman is said to have snapped so much dry spaghetti that it carpeted a kitchen floor. He had noticed something odd—the noodles almost always broke into three or more pieces, rather than two halves. It wasn’t until 2005 that other scientists developed a convincing explanation: When a thin, brittle rod is bent, it will break at its weakest point. But as soon as that happens, waves of force ripple down the two pieces, resulting in a cascade of further snaps. In 2018, another team of scientists found a way to counteract that effect by giving the rods a twist, enabling dry spaghetti, at long last, to be snapped cleanly in two.  

Scientists have studied what makes cooked spaghetti twirl around and spray you with sauce when slurped up through your lips (it’s a basic physical property of the object, it turns out) and why spaghetti standing in a pot of boiling water gradually curls over itself (it can be described with a mathematical model). They even use it as a metaphor for more exotic phenomena, like spaghettification, the stretching-out of matter as it falls into the gravitational pull of a black hole. It shows that while physics may seem like the realm of distant stars and obscure laws, the mysteries of the universe can be found all around us—even when we’re in the kitchen, making a weeknight dinner.