6 replies to this topic

[johnsonn239]

This is a pretty random topic but I found it interesting.
I've heard several times, that if you were to take a bottle of warm water and a bottle of cold water and place them both in a freezer, the warm bottle of water will freeze first.
If anyone else has heard of this or knows any kind of scientific reasoning behind this phenomenon please feel free to enlighten me. I only heard that this actually happens but I've never heard any reasoning to why it is true.

johnsonn239

[gvdlans]

I am sorry to bring this thread to a halt before it has even started.

See http://en.wikipedia....i/Mpemba_effect for a number of explanations.

Interesting effect, that I had never heard of before I read this topic.

[johnsonn239]

I didn't even think about going to Wikipedia for a solution.

Thanks for the link. There are some interesting theories listed there.

johnsonn239

[gvdlans]

The difficult part is to find out that this is called the Mpemba effect. When you know that, it's easy to find lots of interesting links...

[gvdlans]

The Wikipedia article seems to be largely based on the following:

http://math.ucr.edu/.../hot_water.html

[djack77494]

Interesting topic & interesting explanations. I thought it unusual that no one mentioned the idea that for fixed volumes (which I believe was the basis) the mass of cold water will be greater than the mass of warm water. That is even without considering the effect of evaporation, which will magnify the effect further.