The Flip Side of the Coin
The Mpemba effect: when hot water freezes first
Did you know...?
Hot water can freeze sooner than cold water. You’ve probably seen that classic pic floating around of some comedian boiling water, then doing a quick spin-swish in a super cold place, and bam, it freezes instantly into a pretty epic frozen shape.
And yeah, it sounds like a campfire tall tale after someone’s had one too many ciders, but it’s a very real phenomenon called the Mpemba effect.
What is the Mpemba effect?
It’s a super curious phenomenon where, under certain conditions, hot water freezes before cold water. Even though common sense says the cold one should win the race to ice, a lot of the time the hot one turns solid first. It doesn’t happen every time, which is why scientists have been going a little bananas trying to pin it down, but when it does happen it leaves everyone staring like, “Wait, what?”
Why does hot water freeze first?
First thing to say is, it doesn’t always happen, and the exact conditions still aren’t 100% mapped out. But there are a few factors that can tip the scales. To get the idea, imagine the hot water is carrying a much lighter backpack. Because it’s so hot, some of it escapes into the air as vapor. That means there’s actually less water left to freeze, so the whole process can move faster.
Magikitos translation: if today something that looked tough or “too hot to handle” comes out before the easy stuff, don’t assume it’s a trick. Sometimes starting with a ton of energy makes the road shorter, even if it feels like you’re going against the current.
The car that looks like it’s rolling backwards
Have you ever seen a wheel in a video that looks like it’s spinning the wrong way?
In the forest we call it “the proud wheel”. You can see the cart moving forward down the path, but the wheel looks like it’s going backwards, like it just wants to disagree with the oxen. It’s not that the wheel has lost its marbles or that the driver accidentally threw it into reverse. It’s really a little trick your eyes and cameras fall for when they watch something spinning super fast.
What is the stroboscopic effect?
To get it, picture one of those tiny flipbooks where you draw a little doodle in the corner of every page. If you flick the pages fast, the drawing looks like it moves. Video cameras do the same thing, they take lots of pictures one after another, really quickly, then stitch them together. The glitch happens when the wheel spins at a speed that doesn’t line up with the camera’s rhythm. Imagine the camera snaps a frame when one point on the wheel is right at the top. If, by the next frame, the wheel has almost done a full turn but stops just a tiny bit before reaching the top again, your brain gets confused. It thinks the wheel moved a little backwards instead of making almost the whole turn forward. It’s like blinking super fast while someone is dancing. You only catch little slices of the movement and your brain fills in the rest the best it can.
This happens to us in the workshop too with fans, or with some lights that flicker so fast we don’t notice. They still change the way we see things that move. In the end, what we see depends completely on the rhythm we use to look at the world.
Magikita conclusion: sometimes the “unbelievable”, or what looks like it’s going backwards, isn’t out there in the world. It’s in the way we’re looking. If you change the rhythm you use to watch your problems, you might realize they’re not going backwards at all. They’re moving forward in a way you just hadn’t decoded yet.
Upside-down pancakes: filling first, serious face later
Let weird be your secret compass
More and better tomorrow
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