The Perfect Pasta Sauce According to Italian Physicists | Ig Nobel 2025

Cheese is serious stuff. The physics behind cacio e pepe.

Watch the 2025 Ig Nobel Ceremony here: https://youtu.be/z1cP4xKd_L4

In this episode, we sit down with Daniel Busiello and Ivan Di Terlizzi, physicists whose playful kitchen experiments on the classic Roman pasta dish cacio e pepe just earned them the 2025 Ig Nobel Prize. What started as a Friday-night cooking ritual turned into a full-blown study of the “mozzarella phase” of pecorino cheese — revealing how heat, proteins, and stabilizers drive sauce breakdown and mimic the phase transitions seen in labs and nature.

We explore how their simple setup — a sous-vide bath, a pan, and a smartphone — let them quantify clump sizes, why starch or trisodium citrate can stabilize emulsions, and what this says about statistical mechanics, protein aggregation, and gene-expression dynamics. Busiello and Di Terlizzi. also share their paths from reading about relativity in high school to running research groups, and what it’s like to go viral with a “night-science” project.

Whether you’re curious about pasta, phase diagrams, quirky science experiments or the hidden laws of nature, this conversation offers a rare insider’s look at how everyday cooking can illuminate physics.

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Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
01:12 - From Hobbyist to Ig Nobel Laureate
06:33 - Methodology of the Experiment
13:31 - How to Avoid the Mozzarella Phase
19:10 - Career Trajectories
24:44 - Who is the Greatest Italian Scientist?
25:40 - Lesser Known Works
28:05 - Measuring Heat Flow in Red Blood Cells

#ignobel2025 #cacioepepe #pastasauce #thermodynamics  #phasetransitions #dairy #pecorino