Looking at the actual graphs, what is presented appears at first blush to be a bistable system prepared in its higher-energy stable state. (Or at least, prepared in a way that several of its constituent subsystems "fall into" that state.) Transitions to the lower-energy stable state require overcoming a barrier, and jumping over that barrier is of course faster at higher temperatures. At lower temperatures you essentially have a slow internal self-heating from the periodical jumps of subsystems through this forbidden region by thermal excitations, not unlike phosphorescence having to tunnel through an energetically forbidden region; this self-heating prevents the thing from cooling down fast enough.
Actual applicability to water is kind of harder to evaluate. I've long thought that you could indeed have an Mpemba effect caused by persistent induced convective currents in a fluid: so a hotter thing placed into a fridge might create a more dramatic internal flow as its outer boundary layer cools and changes in density, the convective current would certainly increase the slope of the hotter cooling system beyond the naive temperature scaling, and might then persist as a physical difference even after the two systems arrive at the same temperature, leading to a faster cooling speed of the convective system that "started out hotter". But I mean I have never really done experiments to confirm that sort of thing.
> Actual applicability to water is kind of harder to evaluate. I've long thought that you could indeed have an Mpemba effect caused by persistent induced convective currents in a fluid: so a hotter thing placed into a fridge might create a more dramatic internal flow as its outer boundary layer cools and changes in density, the convective current would certainly increase the slope of the hotter cooling system beyond the naive temperature scaling, and might then persist as a physical difference even after the two systems arrive at the same temperature, leading to a faster cooling speed of the convective system that "started out hotter". But I mean I have never really done experiments to confirm that sort of thing.
This sounds like what I was thinking but I'm not sure. Do you mean the actual boundary layer in the hotter fluid would have a higher convective heat transfer, due to increased turbulence/thermal mixing at the surface of hot water (versus cold water)? Thus hot water will cool faster?
You've put into scientific terms what I can't cause it's been too long since I've done any physics.
In layman terms, the molecules in hot water are bouncing around more and thus easier to form crystal structures because of the higher-energy state. Molecules at room temperature have to be forced into crystal structures which takes longer.
A little more explanation is required, since the boiling pot still needs to pass through room temperature on its way to freezing, and it’s not clear how at that point it has a head start on the other room temperature pot.
The boiling pot will never pass through the state where it's uniformly room temperature.
We did this in high school, and put 3 thermometers in both buckets. At the point when the water at the very bottom of the hot bucket reached ~6°C, the top of that bucket was still >60°C. This was in a 30cm tall 10 liter bucket, it really surprised us how strongly the water stratified. The top loses heat fast through evaporation, but the temperature of the water at the top does not fall very fast because the newly-cold water flows rapidly down the sides of the bucket. If you add constant mixing to both buckets, the hot one freezes slower than the room-temperature bucket.
If you want a very simple analogy, boiling water is strongly self stirring especially in a cold environment, whereas cold water in a cold environment does not self stir.
This effect is very old popular science filler material, and in the 80s there was possibly a Mr Wizard or similar TV episode where the effect was demonstrated by taking aquarium air tubing and an "empty" mustard squeeze bottle (only worked with one specific brand, plochman's mustard I think) and fill the "empty" mustard bottle such that you've made free yellow food coloring, then stick the aquarium hose in the clear bucket of freezing water and squirt in some mustard food coloring and watch how the convection currents in the previously hot container are huge and the water turns uniformly yellow in seconds whereas the previously cold water the yellow diluted mustard-water just sits there, pretty much. Its easy to use the hose and a stopwatch to try and quantify the currents. Now a days kids would probably use a smartphone camera or ipad and then use a video editing program to quantify the actual water current speeds vs time/location, but its easy to miss the important overall qualitative interpretation by trying too hard to generate too much quantitative information.
I wonder how many kids watching frozen 2 will subconsciously accept “water has memory” as a fact and believe it in 20 years time, being unable to source why they think it, just something “they know”
That's something people have believed basically forever. The most modern example would be homeopathy, which is explicitly based on the idea that water has memory and significantly predates Frozen 2.
So, the answer to your question is "a really large number", but it's not obvious that Frozen 2 would have influenced them.
It would be more correct to say that homeopathy became explicitly based on water memory after atomic theory and the size of atoms achieved mainstream acceptance. And while Dalton and Avogadro had certainly made convincing arguments based on chemistry in the early 19th century, and thermodynamicists like Boltzman had models of heat and heat transfer that seemed to depend on particles, it wasn't until after Einstein's paper on Brownian motion and Rutherford's interpretation of the Geiger-Marsden experiment that homeopathic dilution just being dilution became an unsustainable notion.
It was always a silly notion, especially when numbers like 30C - a dilution of one part in 10^60, or one molecule of the target substance in 3 × 10^34kg of water, after you understand what molecules are - were being thrown around, but there was at least a plausible explanation before, say, WW1.
I think this is one of those "technically false, but there's a story behind it which makes sense" situations. For much of our history as a species, water most certainly did have "memory" if you consider our pre-modern experience with disease-causing pathogens.
It's not just individual molecules, the vortices that form in boiling water keep going even after it reached room temperature and help distribute the heat so that it can be taken away
In other words inertia. And while that surely winds down eventually, the same convective effect that created the movement during heating will continue while chilling, sustaining it longer than one would expect.
In a typical pot, heat is added at the bottom and lost at the top (mostly through evaporation) and a bit at the sides. When heat isn't added anymore energy loss will still be mainly at the top and at the side, at least when not put on a cold surface. When suspended, e.g. on a gas stove, air convection will mage sir that the sides lose now energy than the bottom. So the direction of the convective drive remains the same in the switch from (usually more violent) heating to chilling, so it will sustain relatively well.
On the other hand, while the inertia fades the energy contained in the movement is turned into additional heat that needs to be transported say, but that's a miniscule amount of energy compared to that contained as heat: try to heat up water beyond room temperature by stirring!
Ah, the model you articulate here suggests that the convective currents prevalent in an (initially) hotter pot of water as it cools, is what drives the higher rate of heat energy loss as compared with a pot of water initially at a uniform temperature matching ambient. As convection does indeed exchange heat faster than conduction, then so long as the differential temperature between top and bottom continues as the pot cools, (and yes the fluid flow does trivially have fluid momentum i.e. inertia mentioned above), then there is a case that it can continhe to lose heat energy faster than the relatively still flowing, initially room temperature, pot of water.
I'm reading this as hot water having more effective heat transfer deep into the container, potentially via some type of self-mixing due to turbulence from the sharp temperature gradient?
This would seem very easy to measure, with and without internal barriers to prevent large scale convection.
Once upon a generation ago, I worked at an ice rink. "Cleaning the ice" using an ice resurfacer involves cutting the top 1/16" of ice off and laying down new water. Hot water is preferred because it freezes faster and produces a denser sheet of ice; a denser sheet of ice is going to be better for skating.
Hot water and is preferred because it has less gasses dissolved and this way it produces clear ice. Also cold water could freeze too quickly, if the rink is very cold, before it has time to spread evenly.
I am pretty sure any tiny time difference, if it exists, would not be worth the hassle of supplying hot water.
> Hot water is preferred because it has less gasses dissolved
true, but while the temperature decreases the air dissolves back in.
What makes ice clear is directional freezing, the sheet freezes from below, pushing the gases up. You can try that in your freezer by putting in it a styrofoam box full of water. Just in this case it will freeze from the top and push the gases downwards. The upper layer will be crystal clear.
I did this experiment many times, myself. If you start with boiled water you will get much thinner layer with bubbles.
Air actually takes a bit of time to diffuse into water if it isn't getting mixed with air (that's why your fish tank needs air to be actively mixed with water). Starting with thin layer of water that was recently hot gives not enough time for any significant amount of air to dissolve.
I work with electronics. I use electronic water for parts cleaning. Electronic water is pure water, distilled, deionized, degassed (no oxygen in it) so it does not oxidise copper traces. It does go bad (bad meaning gets oxygen dissolved) when opened, but think more like hours or even days if proper precautions are taken (don't shake or stir once the container is opened).
I've always imagined that hot water would also preferentially smooth the surface, melting any high spots, deep cuts, or granular ice that might have survived the zamboni.
I don't think it's the effect described in the article. It probably wouldn't be noticeable. It may be that by melting more of the ice below it removes all roughness of the surface where there could be air which is working as an insulation. Additionally, depending on details, by melting more ice it could probably make exchange of heat faster between the surface down below.
Somehow this article provides no explanation at all of how this actually happens. Perhaps the research being reported doesn't really have an explanation either, it's just more demonstration under more controlled conditions?
Or the explanation as it were is just "abstract" and "geometrical", basically just mathematical?
The fact is, you do need to get rid of more heat when using hot water.
Ergo, some sort of self-reinforcing feedback loop must appear when you use hot water, that sucks heat out of it faster. If you use cold water, the "turbocharged" mechanism does not operate for some reason, and heat is lost at a lower rate.
I've no idea what that mechanism is. It's nonlinear behavior for sure.
A hypothesis I’ve heard is that the hot water is more likely to produce currents inside the water, as there’s more of a temperature difference between the inner water and the water right at the edge. These currents then cause the water to cool more uniformly as opposed to outside-in. I believe the person I heard this from tested this by adding baffling to the container to prevent currents, but I’m not sure what the results of that experiment were.
For example, this is why large amateur telescopes perform worse for about an hour after they're brought outside: the mirror is "hot" compared to the air, so a network of toroidal convection cells (spinning doughnuts of air) forms on its surface, ever so slightly messing with the rays of light.
There's actually an attractor for some of these networks (speaking in general), where they form hexagonal cells. Of course, in most cases, it's more disorderly than that.
I'm not sure how a turbocharged network could form, but I'm looking forward to learn more on this topic.
So does the hot water freeze faster or does it cool faster?
Knowing if it freezes faster but doesn’t reach 0 degrees faster would help point to the cause. Especially if it’s known whether the temp is uniform. Is the room temp water super cooling?
Someone needs to do an experiment measuring temperature distribution over time in both hot and room temp water as it freezes.
I have a vivid memory of being taught this in 2nd grade, probably because it seemed (and still seems) extremely counterintuitive. I think the intuition given was that hot water is less dense than cold water, so the coldness can more easily permeate through the liquid (I imagine a vein-like pattern). Something like that.
Admittedly, my understanding of thermodynamics has not progressed much beyond the 2nd grade level (aside from a class on PDEs giving me at least some enhanced intuition). My takeaway from the PDE class was that anything beyond a simple textbook problem needs to be simulated and/or observed experimentally, rather than solved for analytically.
But other things being equal, wouldn’t cold air permeate a less dense barrier (say a layer of insulation in a home) more easily than a dense barrier? Just as water (or cold air) would permeate soil more readily than rock.
Cold AIR permeates. That is correct. But there is no physical concept of COLD. The physical concept that exists is heat energy. Temperature is defined as the amount of heat energy per unit of matter. When something gets colder the physical process happening is that heat energy is leaving the thing and being transferred somewhere else/being converted to another form of energy.
So when cold air comes into a house heat energy is transferred from e.g. the material that makes up the wall into the air warming the air and cooling the walls. The cold air is replacing warm air which moves out of the building.
Thinking of cold penetrating/moving is a terrible mental model. First it is physically wrong. Second the more physically correct mental model of heat moving is just as conceptually easy. Third once you start thinking of heat energy moving classical thermodynamics becomes quite a lot simpler to understand.
I'm not sure about the best mental model for electric circuits. I never understood electricity.
I should have made it more clear that I was trying to recreate the mental model that my teacher’s explanation gave me, at the time. I realized after posting it that my model was wrong—I know it’s really the other way around.
In a similar way, I find the idea of cold permeating a liquid counterintuitive, because I can picture heat going into cold, but not cold into heat. The energy has to go somewhere!
All the talk in the comments about dissolved oxygen brings back a few memories of student lab work that went wrong. I was given a freeze-pump-thaw protocol to follow in order to remove oxygen from a copolymer solution. Basically we used liquid nitrogen to freeze the mixture, then used a vacuum pump to remove the gases above the mixture. When we thawed the mixture, the dissolved oxygen would escape, in order to equilibrate with the amount above the surface. I repeated this for a few cycles. It was all done with sealed glassware.
Unfortunately, the glassware kept cracking during the thaw stage. This went on for a couple of months, till finally my supervisor reviewed the procedure, and realised that, whether cracking occurred, depended upon the relative concentrations of the two polymers. If I recall correctly, the problem occurred when the polymer with the lower freezing point (which, thereby, thawed first) was present at a lower concentration. It was basically trapped inside the other still-frozen polymer, and expanding, as it thawed ... till crack!
The solution was surprisingly simple. Change the method. Bubble nitrogen through the mixture to drive out (sparge) the oxygen. Replacing the oxygen with nitrogen was beneficial, as nitrogen didn't interfere with the copolymerisation reaction.
The main problem was that I had lost two months of experimental time, and this was just the start of a series of experiments and instrumental analyses. It was now Easter and the deadline to hand in my student thesis was early December.
Please don't believe anyone who says students have an easy life.
My high school chemistry teacher simplified it down to the greater "rate of change" of temperature dropping, for the hot water, causes it to end up freezing faster than the cold water.
> Jearl suggested that the most likely explanation for this was evaporation: when water cools down from near boiling to the freezing point, as much as 16 percent evaporates away, compared to 7 percent for water at 160 degrees.
This was known by many Antarctic scientists before 1963. I remember my dad telling me you could throw boiling water into the air and it would freeze into millions of tiny ice crystals before reaching the ground, but that the same wasn't true of cold water. I think he said it was due to thermal inertia.
"Thermal inertia" is more formally known as specific heat capacity or volumetric heat capacity, which is a substance's resistance to change in temperature.
It's similar to (but different from) mechanical inertia, which is an object's resistance to change in velocity.
The latter includes the concept of momentum, that an object with nonzero velocity resists changing it's velocity. There is no such thing as thermal momentum, remove the temperature differential and a thermally uniform substance that's changing temperature at 10 degrees per second will stop getting colder instantly. For related reasons, there's no overshoot when you reach equilibrium, either.
I always learned the explanation as:
1. Cool to freezing via evaporation. Because this goes as T^4, the time difference is negligible to reach 0°C. But...hot water loses more volume.
2. Freeze, bit now you need less energy to freeze less material.
I did this at home, and the simple check worked: volume was lower in the frozen hot water.
This explanation might be wrong! But it works out in simple tests and mathematically.
It definitely can all freeze, -40 (conveniently the same in F and C) is about the point where the trick starts working well, but the effect gets more pronounced as the temperature goes lower.
If it's cold enough, and you throw a cup of boiling hot water in to the air, every bit of the thrown water will turn in to something like snow, and no liquid comes back down. It seems like the size of the flung water droplets is important, like if the water is thrown more vigorously the effect is more pronounced.
I wintered at the South Pole in 2014, the year the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was a big thing. One of our crew did it, outside. We discovered a similar effect: when it's even colder out, maybe -80s F: ice water makes what looks like a cloud of steam - in the video (sorry, can't find it quickly) it looked a bit like he was cheating.
I'm not 100% sure it is the same phenomenon but growing up in a very cold climate where I had to park my car outside in high school I remember many times getting into the car where a half full Poland Spring plastic water bottle would sit with water. If I tapped the bottle - the entire thing would freeze in under a second. It looked amazing.
(I always thought it was a pressure thing - but not positive if that is what the article is describing or something more nuanced)
there is a similar inverse process for hot water as well... if you take a very very clean and perfectly smooth surfaced (on the inside) cup/glass and microwave it to just before the point of boiling, then drop anything into it (sugar, coffee, a teaspoon... pretty much anything) it will very energetically, instantly boil.. often vertically... be careful performing this experiment.
If you put warm water in your ice try, you can get clearer ice near the surface, because the ice will freeze from the top surface instead of from all sides at once trapping bubbles of air with no where to go :D
That's interesting. But don't drink the hot water from the hot water tank. It can be dissolved with unhealthy minerals and chemicals. A few years ago, I had to replace a couple of hot water tanks. When I drained them, the last few gallons at the bottom of the tanks looked like yellow vomit, it was seriously disgusting.
It’s the same minerals that you ingest when you drink cold water, just more concentrated.
It’s mostly just magnesium and calcium salts, likely carbonate but some sulfate as well, depending on the chemistry of the water.
A bigger concern with drinking hot water is bacteria if you don’t keep the tank hot enough, or lead from soldered joints. Hot water will leach stuff from your plumbing faster than cold water.
But overall, in a normal, modern system, drinking hot water from the tap isn’t particularly risky.
That's why you're supposed to purge your hot water tank periodically.
Also keep in mind that yellow sludge comes from somewhere... like the cold water coming into the hot water tank. So... it's probably in the "healthier" cold water no different.
The solubility of some minerals, such as lead, increases drastically with higher temperature (https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z4s48mn/revision/2). Hot water will have much higher concentrations of those minerals compared to cold water. This is not a closed-system, steady state flow equation, since the hot water can pull in additional chemicals from its environment: metal or plastic pipes, fittings, anode rods (aluminum and zinc). The lining inside the hot water tank is made from many different materials, including synthetic polymers (https://www.bijlibachao.com/water-heaters/coating-storage-wa...), which can degrade over time and leach more chemicals into the hot water. Finally, bacteria (e.g. Legionnaires) can grow in the water tank if the water is not hot enough.
I think that's a pretty un-based fear. Almost certainly any restaurant, and especially a bar, will use a professional ice making machine. At the volumes if ice they go through, it wouldn't make sense to make it in any other way.
This new paper may prove to be conclusive in supporting its existence, but as I'm not an expert I'll give it some time in peer review before coming to any conclusion.
Punchline seems to be that “hot” but out-of-equilibrium material cannot be summarized by a “temperature”, providing many paths towards freezing (on the landscape of microstates), some of which could (efficiently) circumvent the “low temp” state.
A marginally related question for the experts here: I love extremely cold water, juices and drinks, so I often keep them in the freezer in plastic bottles. Now, if I take out a bottle of something that is just about to freeze, as soon as I open the bottle, it almost immediately freezes although I am certainly not removing heat from it but actually doing the opposite by keeping it with my hands, not to mention the warmer environment in which it is now.
I couldn't explain it in any other way than with the different pressure, that is, the water expands when it freezes, so the almost freezing liquid is already under higher internal pressure compared to the moment it was closed, but as soon as I open it the pressure drops abruptly, which would be enough to compensate for the higher temperature, de facto freezing the water.
Perhaps it has to do with the increased turbulence in the hotter fluid? This would be a result of the higher saturated vapor pressure of the liquid leading to greater evaporation/boiling. Even as it cools down the higher temperature difference between the hot fluid and room temperature should produce a more turbulent boundary layer along the surface of the water.
The turbulence will reduce the thermal resistance associated with laminar surface air films on colder surfaces, which would normally be insulating surface, so you'd get a faster heat loss then with a more stagnant layer of cold water.
I wonder if this is a right analogy. Imagine two cars one going fast, one slow. If driver of the fast car steps on the break harder than the driver of the slow car, he will stop faster. The temperature difference is similar to how fast you step on the break.
But cooling rate is proportional to the temperature difference (see Newton's law of cooling). Thus the hotter water may start cooling faster, once it reaches the initial temperature of the cooler water, it would cool at the same rate as the cooler water did initially. It then couldn't possibly reach freezing point earlier.
But in some conditions it does, which is the surprising result.
Hot water freezing faster in an ice cube tray is commonly reported, a bunch of reasons could explain it. Evaporation can reduce the volume of water, and the smaller volume freezes faster. A hot tray will settle into any ice build up in the freezer (which is common) increasing the rate of heat exchange. Hot water will create currents in the air and water (driven by the higher water temperature) which help the exchange. On the flip side lower temperature differences will often cause a stagnant layer that will reduce the temp exchange, much like sitting in a cold pool which gets better if you want a few seconds... until you move again.
The reported experiment reduces the variables by using glass instead of water, so there's no internal flow, but that doesn't stop the airflows generated in the air.
Looking at the actual graphs, what is presented appears at first blush to be a bistable system prepared in its higher-energy stable state. (Or at least, prepared in a way that several of its constituent subsystems "fall into" that state.) Transitions to the lower-energy stable state require overcoming a barrier, and jumping over that barrier is of course faster at higher temperatures. At lower temperatures you essentially have a slow internal self-heating from the periodical jumps of subsystems through this forbidden region by thermal excitations, not unlike phosphorescence having to tunnel through an energetically forbidden region; this self-heating prevents the thing from cooling down fast enough.
Actual applicability to water is kind of harder to evaluate. I've long thought that you could indeed have an Mpemba effect caused by persistent induced convective currents in a fluid: so a hotter thing placed into a fridge might create a more dramatic internal flow as its outer boundary layer cools and changes in density, the convective current would certainly increase the slope of the hotter cooling system beyond the naive temperature scaling, and might then persist as a physical difference even after the two systems arrive at the same temperature, leading to a faster cooling speed of the convective system that "started out hotter". But I mean I have never really done experiments to confirm that sort of thing.