When a plate drops or a glass smashes, you're annoyed by the mess and the cost of replacing them. But for some physicists, the broken pieces are a source of fascination: Why does everything break into ...

When a delicate object crashes onto the floor, most people expect it to shatter into several pieces. What they might not know, however, is that the sizes of those fragments—whether from a broken plate ...

Fragmentation, the way objects break into pieces, has long intrigued scientists. Researchers have observed that broken objects tend to produce fragments in a wide range of sizes, and the distribution ...

A dropped plate, a smashed sugar cube and a broken drinking glass all seem to follow the same law of physics when it comes to how many fragments of a given size they will shatter into. For several ...