When you see pasta, your brain probably doesn't jump to the secrets of the universe. But for almost a century, physicists have puzzled over spaghetti's counterintuitive properties.

You might think physicists only ask the big questions. We mostly hear about the physics of the cosmic and the miniscule, the shape of our universe and the nature of the particles that fill it. But physicists, of course, have ordinary lives outside of the laboratory, and sometimes their way of questioning the universe spills over to their daily habits. There's one everyday item that seems to especially obsess them: spaghetti.

Going back at least a century, spaghetti has been the subject of rigorous studies. Through this research, physicists continue to learn new things about the solid state of matter, the chemistry of food and even draw connections to the origin of life. The steady torrent of spaghetti science helps to demonstrate that deep questions lurk in our ordinary routines, and that there are plenty of hungry physicists who can't stop asking them.

For example: how thin can spaghetti get? The typical spaghetto – the word for an individual strand of spaghetti – is between one and two mm thick (0.04-0.08in). But other long noodles vary widely in diameter, from udon at 4mm (0.16in) to angel hair at 0.8mm (0.03in). The thinnest handmade strands are called su filindeu, coming in at 0.4mm (0.02in), so slender that only a few women in Nuoro, Italy know how to make them.

But recently, a team of researchers at the University College London wondered if 21st Century lab equipment could do better. They used a technique called "electro-spinning". First, they dissolved flour into a special, electrically charged solution in a syringe. Then they held the syringe over a special, negatively-charged plate. "This pulls the solution through the dispenser needle down towards the collector plate in a very stringy noodle-type shape," says Beatrice Britton, lead author of the study.

When the solution dried, the researchers were left with a crisscrossing thread of incredibly thin spaghetti. "To the naked eye, all you see is a sort of lasagna sheet," Britton says, but a powerful microscope reveals a mat made of strands as thin as 0.1mm (0.004in). These noodles are also much stiffer than regular spaghetti. Britton and her colleagues hope their research can be a step towards biodegradable alternatives to plastic "nanofibres", which are now used to filter liquids and treat wounds.

The world's thinnest spaghetti is just one recent example of how physicists can't seem to stop plying their tools on everybody's favourite carb. But physicists using their noodle on their noodles is no new thing. In 1949, Brown University physicist George F Carrier posed "the spaghetti problem" in The American Mathematical Monthly, which he deemed to be "of considerable popular and academic interest". Essentially, the problem amounts to: "Why can't I slurp up a strand of spaghetti without getting sauce on my face"?

His equations showed how the exposed strand swings about more wildly as it gets shorter and shorter, guaranteeing an eventual slap of the noodle against the slurper's lip – and the fateful sauce eruption Carrier so deplored. Sadly, his mathematical formulas offered no way around the face-slap. It's as deeply etched in the laws of the universe as the Big Bang.

Later, two scientists inverted Carrier's pioneering study, exploring what happens when a stringy object slips out of a hole instead of being sucked in. They called their version the "reverse spaghetti problem", familiar to any impatient eater who's had to spit out burning pasta because they hadn't waited for it to cool. For now, no theoretical physicist has attempted the more complicated problem of two........

© BBC