Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. Josh here, chuck here, giddy up.
Yeah, we're going to tell you in part about a remarkable young teenager in Tanzania in the nineteen sixties, and his name was Rasto im Pimba.
Is it Impemba, It's in Pimpa, Okay. The reason why we're talking about Rasto and Pemba today is because he was a pretty remarkable kid. He stumbled upon I guess you could say rediscovered a concept that just baffles physicists today because it doesn't make any sense, it may violate
the second law of thermodynamics. And it ended up being named after him because he was a persistent little cuss who made this observation and just kept going until he finally got the ear of somebody who could help him try to figure it out.
You know, the first law of thermodynamics is you don't talk about thermo dynamics.
I was thinking about that movie the other day. I was like, I used to be so into that, and now I'm so juvenile.
I know.
I almost put it on the other day as a laundry folding movie, which I like to do just to see parts of And I.
Had the same thought. I was like, I don't know if I just even want to go down that road again.
Yeah, because it exists happily in the past, you know what I mean exactly? I heard at the premiere Brad Pitt leaned over to Edward Norton and said, I'll never be in a movie this cool again, And he was right. I think he was. So. Yeah, we're talking about Arresto and Pemba because he discovered what's called the Mpemba effect after him, and I think I said earlier that he rediscovered it. It was first noticed by Aristotle, or at least it was first written about all the way back
to Aristotle. Medieval scientist Roger Bacon mentioned it as well, so did the Enlightenment philosopher Renee des Cartes. And what they all noticed and what Erastom and Pemba got his his name attached to, is that hot liquids placed in a freezer can freeze faster than cool liquids placed in the same freezer at the same time. It makes no sense whatsoever.
Yeah, he discovered this as a thirteen year old. He was in class in Tanzania and they were making in school and they were making ice cream as a class. I don't know if that was for fun or if it was part of science. I like to think it's part of science. But regardless, he you know, they added sugar to the boiling fresh milk. You let it cool, you put it in a container, you put it in the freezer. They were doing this again another day. I bet they just like it ice cream now, then I
think about it. Sure, he was like, Hey, the freezer space is getting low, and I want to make my special ice cream. So he's like, I'm not going to let this stuff cool down. I'm just going to go grab that spot while it's available. And an hour and a half later he was like, hey, everybody, my ice cream is ready before yours.
In your face.
Yeah, and he said, but that doesn't make any sense because I put that hot milk in, so why would mine have frozen at all? And he went to his teacher, and his teacher said, I got too much to deal with, so you run along, Rasto.
Yeah, I'm not curious like you.
No, and Erasto was undeterred over the years. Teacher after teacher as he made his way through middle school and the high school, he would talk to them about this discovery and he was dismissed by all of them. And then finally, one day at his high school, a physicist who was a visiting physicist to the University of Darus Salam. He was a British guy named Dennis Osborne. He came to give a lecture and Rasto and Pemba saw his chance and said, Professor Osborne, I've got something that may
knock your socks off. Check this out, do.
You think In the teacher's lounge over the years, everyone was like, hey, has and Pimba hit.
You up about this ice cream business.
Yes.
Yeah, they're all drinking wine and rolling, so annoying.
All the scientific curiosity out of this kid.
I know. Luckily, Dennis Osbourne was like, ooh, I like that. Let's talk a little more about it.
He likes this kid, and they he invited him in to you know, to perform experiments to see if it worked. And then by nineteen sixty nine, I guess Impemba is nineteen years old. By this point, they had written a paper on this phenomenon and he was like, hey, buddy, we got a name after you.
Yeah, which I'm sure he was like, heckynah, let's take a break and we'll talk a little more about the Impemba effect itself. How about that, right, Okay, Chuck. So, the reason that the Mpemba effect is so strange is because, according to the laws of thermae dynamics, molecules that are moving much faster than other molecules in say, like a hot liquid and a cold liquid, they take longer to
slow down. And part of the very process of slowing down temperature, by the way, as a measurement of the excitement or movement of molecules in a substance, right, part of the process of slowing down is that it takes time.
So it makes no sense intuitively, but also according to the laws of physics that a hot liquid with faster moving molecules could get to the point of freezing faster than a cooler liquid with slower moving molecules, because they're both trying to get to the point where they stop moving in are solid blocks of ice.
Yeah, it would just make intuitive sense that something colder and closer to that temperature would do it faster. You can also observe this if you go out in Let's say you live in Minneapolis and it's January. You go outside with a cup of warm water and throw it into the air. That will go into an icy mist instantaneously if it's cold enough. If you do that same thing with a glass of cold water, that won't happen.
No, yeah, are you serious?
Yeah?
Are you pulling my leg?
No?
I mean that's I saw a video of it, and that's what they say. Is another example that's really great.
I don't have first hand experience because it doesn't get that cold here.
Very cool though.
No.
Instead, you can fry an egg on a sidewalk, am I right? Yeah?
Right?
So I guess essentially a good analogy that I came up with, That's why I think it's good is that Erasso and Pemba basically found that there's a foot race between like hot water and cold water, and that, well, I screwed up my analogy already, Chuck, do you want to take it?
I believe that there's a foot race, but one racer has started sooner, yet the one behind gets there quicker, even though they should supposedly be running at the same rate of speed. This happens at braves games. Oh and you know what, it's mister Freeze who they're racing.
Isn't that funny?
Oh wow. So they're clearly fans of the Mpemba effect.
There's a track, clearly a track guy dressed up as mister Freeze and they let a person from the stands. They bring him down in the outfield and they they give them a pretty long, like a quarter of the distance head start, and then mister Freeze starts and you almost always lose. But a young woman the other day beat mister Freeze and it was it's on YouTube. It's very cool to watch because you could tell that she knew what she was doing.
Nice because she was.
Not running that hard until mister Freeze went. She was running at a decent clip. And then as soon as they hit the timer for mister Freeze to start, she kicked.
It into the next gear wow and whipped him. It was great.
That's awesome. I remember they used to have giant hammers and rulers and stuff. Oh they started on depot racing. Yeah, they have multiple whole races at Home Braves Games. Now.
Yeah, they got mister Freeze and they have the home Depot hammer drill.
I can't remember what the third.
One was, so silly. I gotta go this year man.
Yeah, I've been to a few games. Well, let's go they stink?
Oh really?
Oh yeah, the braves are terrible this year. It's very big disappointment. But you know, what are you gonna do?
Or braves? So yeah, that was a great analogy, Chuck, way to go.
Thanks.
So it turns out that answering this weird problem has been trickier than you'd think, Trickier than physicists thought. Yeah, because some physicists conducting experiments and the Mpemba effect have shown yep, this is definitely a thing. Other experimenters have not turned up any results, and they're like, no, I don't know what you're talking about. And so the fact that it happens under some cases and not others is not only even weirder, it also suggests to dissenters. People
are like, there's no such thing as the Impemba effect. Yeah, but there's some variable that some experimenters aren't taking into effect. It could be different mineral contents in the water. It could be convection cells in the warmer water are causing it to freeze faster. It could be that our freezers work harder on warmer air than cooler air, so it'll freeze faster in a freezer. They don't know, but they're like,
there's no such thing as the Impemba effect. It's really just some mistaken variable in the experiments.
Yeah, for sure.
And there's also a long argument about this about what freezing first actually means, Like you have to if you're gonna do something like this, you got to agree what that when you're technically freezing and who got there first. It's not like mister Freeze running across that finish line and hitting his chest to that tape.
No, that's obvious. So you got to agree on freeze first?
Is that? Like, hey, is it the first one to reach thirty two degrees fahrenheit zero degree celsius if it starts to form ice crystals, if it's good enough to put in a cocktail without getting too water down. And I'm gonna let you take MIT's engineering school response because it was very actually, guys, and not at all helpful.
It totally was. There was a blog post by them that basically said, all liquids freeze at the same rate once they reach the freezing temperature, so no liquid can technically freeze faster than another. And you got the impression they really thought that they had solved the Impemba effect.
Yeah, that's not what we're talking about. Mit, No, the one is talking about that.
No, the rest of the world is like, Nope, we're talking about if you put a warm cup of water and a cool cup of water in a freezer at the same time, not once, what happens once they reach freezing. So if you even if you say, okay, we're going to talk about, like we're going to use as the milestone or the finish line, which of these things gets to thirty two years farentheight or zero degrees celsius first the freezing point. Yeah, there's still a big discrepancy in
how you track this kind of stuff. Yeah, and different experimenters have been using essentially what you call like different stopwatches, even though they're not actually standing there with a stopwatch. And it wasn't until some researchers from Kyoto in twenty twenty five basically figured out a measurement standard that any lab could use to test the Mpemba effect. So now all of these experiments are going to be comparing apples to apples for results and hopefully we'll get to the bottom of it.
Yeah, for sure, this is the part that I think is the coolest is that some researchers out there are like, hey, I guess in principle, I agree that we're not noticing some variable, but we feel like we've accounted for all the variables and perhaps there might be some unknown variable that we haven't discovered yet.
Yeah, like some force or effect in nature that's just undiscovered that we're seeing in the Mpemba effect. Yeah, I'd love that to you. So you might say, like, Okay, aside from just science being curious and wanting to know the answers to everything, like what's the point in studying
the by effect? And I was very surprised to find that there's a lot of reasons to understand this that just knowing how fluid dynamics or systems under fluid dynamics relax or cool it would actually open up or overcome a huge hurdle that quantum computing is facing right now. They have to figure out how to get quibits, which are the quantum computing version of ones and zeros and traditional computers back to their ground state as fast as possible.
So if you can figure out how something like molecules stop moving faster than cool molecules, hot molecules. You might be able to apply that to quantum computing, and that would be a huge leap.
Forward for it, totally, Yeah, because cooling those things down takes a lot of energy, and I want to do an episode about the AI's environmental cost at some point soon.
Okay, Sure, you could also develop new sensors, new materials, and at the base you could also make better freezers and refrigerators.
Too, Yeah, for sure.
As for Impimba himself, he overcame a lot of obstacles to eventually have a nice long career as a game warden, and very sadly just passed away a couple of years ago in twenty twenty three.
But he was older, right, twenty Yes, seventy three.
That's not yeah, and it's not a bad life. But our scientific curiosity had his off to you.
Sir, Yes, And that means short stuff is appen.
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