Mpemba effect – Hot water freezes faster

en.wikipedia.org

17 pointsagumonkey3 comments

The article leaves in unclear whether this is actually a reproducible effect, or even what exactly the claim is. The "Recent Reviews" section seems to be the most informative part of this article.

You may be able to reproduce the effect for yourself, at home; try it and see. I have reproduced it occasionally.

The curiosity is not that it is not reliable, but that it can happen at all; the effect experimentally can violate Newton's Law of Cooling, which means that there must be some interesting non-classical (quantum or electronic) effect.

At home I probably have a hard time accounting for things like dissolved gases.

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