This apparently simple question continues to generate substantial controversy. Takamasa Takahashi, a physicist at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wis., tries a definitive response:
“Cold water doesn’t boil faster than hot water. The rate of heating of a liquid is dependent upon the size of the temperature difference between the liquid and its surroundings (the fire on the stove, for instance). As a result, cold water will be absorbing heat quicker while it’s still cold; after it gets up to the warmth of hot water, then the heating rate slows down and from that point it takes just as long to bring it to a boil as the water that was warm to begin with. Because it requires cold water some time to reach the temperature of warm water, cold water obviously takes longer to boil than hot water does. There may be some psychological effect at play; chilly water begins boiling earlier than you might expect because of the aforementioned greater heat absorption speed when water is colder.
“To the first part of the question–‘Does hot water freeze faster than cold water?’ –the response is’Not generally, but maybe under certain conditions.’ It takes 540 calories to vaporize one g of water, whereas it takes 100 calories to deliver one gram of liquid water from 0 degrees Celsius to 100 degrees C. When water is hotter than 80 degrees C, the rate of cooling by rapid vaporization is very high because every evaporating gram draws at least 540 calories from the water left behind. This is a really large amount of heat compared with the 1 calorie per Celsius degree that is drawn from every gram of water which cools by routine thermal conduction.
“It all depends on how quickly the cooling happens, and it turns out that hot water won’t freeze before cold water but will freeze before lukewarm water. Water at 100 degrees C, for instance, will freeze before water warmer than 60 degrees C but not before water cooler than 60 degrees C. This phenomenon is especially evident when the surface region which cools by accelerated evaporation is large compared with the total amount of water involved, like if you wash a vehicle with hot water on a cold winter day. [For reference, consider Conceptual Physics, by Paul G. Hewitt (HarperCollins, 1993).]
“Another situation where warm water may freeze faster is when a bowl of cold water along with a pan of hot water of equivalent mass are placed in a freezer compartment. There is the effect of evaporation mentioned above, and also the thermal contact with an freezer shelf will cool the bottom region of the body of water. If water is chilly, close to four degrees C (the temperature at which water is densest), subsequently near-freezing water in the bottom increases into the surface. Convection currents will last until the entire body of water is 0 degrees C, at which point all the water eventually freezes. If the water is initially hot, cooled water in the base is denser than the warm water on top, therefore no convection will happen and the bottom part begins freezing while the top is still warm. This effect, together with the evaporation impact, can make hot water freeze faster than cold water sometimes. In cases like this, naturally, the freezer will probably have worked harder throughout the given time period, extracting more heat from warm water.”
Robert Ehrlich of George Mason University, in Fairfax, Va., adds to some of the things made by Takahashi:
“There are just two ways in which warm water could freeze faster than cold water. 1 way [clarified in Jearl Walker’s book The Flying Circus of Physics (Wiley, 1975)] depends on the fact that warm water disappears faster, so that if you began with equal masses of warm and cold water, there would soon be less of the warm water to freeze, and therefore it might overtake the cold water and freeze first, because the lower the bulk, the briefer the freezing time. The other way it could occur (in the event of a flat-bottomed dish of water placed in a freezer) is if the hot water melts the ice below the base of the dish, leading to a superior thermal contact when it refreezes.”
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