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The Teenager Who Disproved Thermodynamics: The Mpemba Effect
This is a bit of a riddle. It turns out that if you have a glass of hot water and you have a glass of cold water, and you put them in a freezer, one of them freezes faster than the other. The hot water actually freezes more quickly. This is called the Mpemba effect.
The Mpemba effect was in fact named after a Tanzanian schoolboy who thought against all logical reasoning that ice cream would freeze quicker if it was first heated. His classmates and peers mocked him until he partnered up with his instructor and they performed an experiment.
Erasto Bartholomeo Mpemba was a teenager at the time and he went to school in Tanzania in the 1960s. He had lessons in cookery and that’s what led him to the ice cream angle. He was taught to make ice cream by heating up milk and sugar together on the stove. Then you’re supposed to leave the mixture to cool to room temperature before you put it in the freezer to make delicious ice cream. Maybe because he was just a rebel without a cause or a rebel without a cream, he put his hot mix of milk and sugar straight into the freezer. He found that it froze faster than it should have been. Everybody assumed it would take longer. That’s just common sense, right? It’s strange because it turned out that was not the case.
From what we understand, Mpemba was kind of the black sheep of his class. He wasn’t super popular. That’s because he stuck to his guns and some of his quirks were weird ones in 1963. When Mpemba was in form three at Makamba secondary school, he was fond of making ice cream. Recall that he had decided to put his hot mixture of ice cream into the freezer. He came back an hour and a half later to check on it and found that his tray of milk had frozen into ice cream completely but that of his pals, who had put a cooled mixture, was still not frozen. It became a thick liquid, but it wasn’t quite ice cream. He was surprised and he asked his physics teacher about it. His physics teacher thought he was confused because what he was describing was the impossible in the 1960s.
So, he kind of let it go assumably because he thought his teacher knew better. But later that year, he met a pal who had his own little side hustle, selling ice cream. He told Mpemba…
