Mpemba Effect

I first read about the Mpemba effect when I was reading through Jearl Walker's fun book "The Flying Circus of Physics". This is the effect where warm water freezes faster than cold water. It was thought to be simply an old wives tale, but this effect turns out to be real.

What amazes me is the amount of published work that has resulted in trying to come up with a qualitative and quantitative explanation of this effect. In fact, one just appeared on the e-print ArXiv this morning, which was the impetus for me to report on this effect.

So these 3 preprints (some may have been published) should provide quite a fascinating description of this intriguing effect.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.1381
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0604224
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0512262

Zz.