Methodical Deception - 911 Very Interesting Inside The Airline Persective

[Drew Phipps]

I did say that it was a poor analogy.

My main point is that when things start breaking, you introduce an extra degree of magnitude (maybe) of factors affecting the outcome, and you will get more of a chaotic distribution of broken material than a well ordered distribution.

To flog my poor analogy to its breaking point (ha hah), if I snap a single strand of spaghetti, I might get 2 pieces, or 3, or more, and there is no way for me to know that outcome in advance. If I get only 2, they both stay in my hands. If there are three pieces, I can guess that the extra one will fly off in a direction commensurate with the force applied, but the distance it will fly depends partly upon the size of the broken off piece, which I cannot possibly know in advance. If there are more than three pieces, there is no way to predict where or how far they will go.

Now if I break several strands of spaghetti, not only do I have the uncertainties above (times the number of strands in my hand) but also the probability that the little bits will interact with each other. The problem quickly devolves from a high school textbook solution into a completely indeterminate and chaotic one.

Now I concede that gravity tends to work along the length of a steel beam (assuming its vertical) and my analogy has a force that works sideways to the spaghetti. However, Newton's Second Law, though it does have a vector component as to direction, makes no distinction between the kinds of force used. The acceleration and the resulting movement won't depend on if the force applied is by hand, by gravity, magnetism, or by telekinesis, or tractor beams.

Although I've never tried this, I assume that if I managed to balance a brick on an upright strand of spaghetti, I'd probably, eventually, get spaghetti all over the kitchen, just as if I'd snapped it by hand.