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.
