1. Does hot water or cold water freeze faster?
Hypothesis: If two glasses with ½ cup of cold and hot water respectively are placed into a freezer, then the glass with cold water will take less time to freeze than hot water because it is already closer to freezing temperature.
How long the water takes to freeze
Water (½ cup for each glass)
2 Glasses (preferably similar if not the exact same sort)
1. Turn sink tap to coldest setting, measure out ½ cup of water and put in a glass
2. Check temperature of water
4. Turn sink tap to hottest setting, measure out ½ cup of water and put in a glass
5. Check temperature of water
7. Put both glasses in the freezer and set a stopwatch, checking in periodically (every 5-10 minutes or so) until a layer of ice covers the entire surface of the water
8. Repeat steps 1-7 two more times
According to my data, my hypothesis was correct: it takes longer for hot water to freeze than cold water. However, after doing some research online, I realized that the hot water should have taken less time to freeze than the cold due to the phenomena known as the “Mpemba Effect.” The Mpemba Effect has a few different explanations as to why it happens, but the most compelling to me was that warm water evaporates more rapidly and, since it’s an endothermic process, it cools the water down and freezes it more quickly. One thing I noticed about the hot water freezing that didn’t happen with the cold water in my experiment was the ice crystals on the sides of the glass, indicating that the water had been evaporating and was frozen to the side of the glass which is why this explanation makes sense to me. The Mpemba Effect is also explained by the hydrogen bonds bringing water molecules into close contact, forcing the O-H bonds to stretch and store more energy (This is the website I found: https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/why-hot-water-freezes-faster-than-cold-physicists-solve-the-mpemba-effect-d8a2f611e853 )
My data was correct to my experiment, but didn’t correctly reflect the results it was supposed to. There’s plenty of room for error in this experiment that may have caused it: perhaps I waited too long to put them in the freezer when I was trying to gauge their temperatures at the same time, or maybe (the most likely possibility, I think) I didn’t make the water hot enough to start with, so it didn’t have enough energy to evaporate to cool itself down fast enough.