Here’s your chance to investigate the Mpemba Effect. There’s a video of some Canadian dude on the internet performing this interesting experiment. He takes a hard plastic water gun (A Nerf weapon would probably not work; you’ll see why)sucks up boiling water into it (That’s why you use hard plastic) and squirts the water out into the air. The air, which is just as cold as ours has been, maybe colder, instantly froze the steam into an icy mist almost like snow—instantly. There’s another one where somebody just flings cupfuls of boiling water out into frigid air. Same thing happens.
Physicists and scientists of every stripe, since Aristotle and Francis Bacon, have been arguing about whether and how and why warmer water will sometimes freeze faster than colder water. That’s the essence of the Mpemba Effect(Named for Erasto Mpemba of Tanzania, who was a school boy at the time he and a visiting professor put forward their theory), the assertion that, in some circumstances, warmer water can freeze faster than colder water. They still haven’t figured it out, though there are plenty of thoughts on the subject.
Fun to watch, in any case.
