Why does hot water freeze faster than cold water?

Hot water freezes faster than cold water?

The scientific phenomenon of hot water freezing faster than cold water is known as the Mpemba effect, named after Erasto Mpemba, a Tanzanian student who in 1963 was making ice cream as part of a school project.

The students were meant to boil a mixture of cream and sugar, let it cool down, and then put it in the freezer.

Worried about getting a spot in the freezer, Mpemba instead put his mixture in while it was still scorching hot. But after 1.5 hours, his mixture had frozen, while his classmates' mixtures had not.

Intrigued by this phenomenon, he went on to work with physics professor Denis Osborne, and together they were able to replicate the findings and publish a paper in 1969 showing that warm water freezes faster than cold water.

It was the first peer-reviewed study on the effect, but as Derek notes in the video above, observations date all the way to Aristotle in the 4th century BCE, who observed that hot water cooled sooner than cold during his experiments.

Thermodynamics tells us that heat moves from a warmer body to a colder body, never the other direction. Colder bodies don't add "cold" to a warmer body, they just take the heat.

The greater the temperature change, the faster this distribution of heat will take place.

Therefore, in a perfect setting, boiling water, or at least water warmer than the cold water, will melt the ice faster.

However, interesting science happens when an ice cube sits in warm water in a typical setting: when it's in a pot of warm water that isn't running or moving. All heat transfers take place on the surface of objects. So when the cube is placed in the water, the water will begin melting the outer surface of the ice. However, as it melts, it turns to cold water, colder than the warm water in the bowl. This cold water envelops the ice, creating an insulating layer. Therefore the heat from the water moves t o this layer, instead of the ice. Then as that cold water sheath begins warming up, the ice will begin to melt a little more and replenish that sheath. The heat is now going through 2 steps to get to the ice.

This process greatly slows down the rate at which the ice melts, simply because the water is not flowing, but standing. So much so that ice cubes placed under running under colder water will melt faster.

Recap: The greater the temperature difference the faster the heat exchange. Moving hot water will melt ice faster than moving cold water. However, moving cold water will beat stagnant warm water

Sir Frances Bacon and Descartes also noted the phenomenon in their studies.

But what's the physics behind this strange phenomenon?

T here are five proposed mechanisms for what's going on here:

1.  Frost melting: Frost is an insulator, and so frosty cold water might keep its heat better than a warm beaker that melts the frost off its sides.

2.  Dissolved gasses: There are more dissolved gasses in cold water than warm water, and researchers have predicted that this could play a role in cooling rates, although it's not clear how.

3.  Supercooling: We all know that water freezes at zero degrees Celsius, but sometimes it gets a lot colder before it freezes - a phenomenon known as supercooling. This occurs because ice needs a nucleation site, such as an air bubble or impurity in the water in order to form. So maybe warm water experiences less supercooling than cold water.

4.  Evaporation: The hot water beaker loses more water molecules through evaporation, so there's less of it to freeze.

5.  Convection: Finally, there's the idea that warm water might cool faster due to increased convection currents. These currents occur because water cools primarily from its surface and the sides of the beaker, causing cold water to sink and warm water to rise up and take its place. The currents are greater in warm beakers, and could affect cooling rates.

There's merit in all those ideas, but the problem is that experiments over the years have controlled for all these effects, and the results have been frustratingly inconsistent.

Some labs have failed to show the Mpem

ba effect happening at all, while others show it happening even under varying conditions.

So what's the answer? Well a new study published this year suggests that maybe the Mpemba effect is being caused by something else entirely - and it has nothing to do with how quickly hot water cools.

So finally only god knows the answer.