Implementation

At Nottingham Trent University in England, a physics professor and students demonstrated how science is present in everyday life through fun experiments, such as those involving cooking pasta. When cooking dry pasta, two relatively simple processes come into play.

The pasta must first rehydrate and soften by absorbing water. This is a diffusion process, meaning that the molecules of boiling water will penetrate to the center of a spaghetti strand of standard diameter in about 10 minutes. Note that diffusion slows down over time, since it would take 40 minutes for water to penetrate pasta that is twice as thick as standard spaghetti. This explains why some pieces of pasta can be difficult to chew when the spaghetti sticks together in the pot: the water simply hasn’t had time to diffuse to the center of the clumps of pasta.

The pasta then...