This article written by Emily Conover for sciencenews.org states that cooling something down, known as “precooling”, prior to heating can cause that heating process to take less time. This is known as the Mpemba effect, and it is a topic that is hard to replicate in testing and therefore controversial. However, these two scientists created a way to theoretically prove that effect as being true. Let’s see if their study stands up to the test.
The first move didn’t help with this particular search. Snopes, Politifact and Factcheck.org revealed no helpful articles when searched on DuckDuckGo. Wikipedia was visited in move 3, and will be expanded on later on.
The study itself was linked in the article. The study explains in more advanced terms what Conover summarized in her article. This study by A. Gal and O. Raz was published in the Physical Review letters, a physics based scientific journal with a clear audience of advanced physicists. Even the titles of these articles are incomprehensible to me, and I got an A in physics in high school. Wikipedia says that the journal is published by the American Physical Society on a weekly basis, and has an international following; it is called “one of the most prestigious journals in the field of physics” by scientists in that field.
Emily Conover’s name is linked on the article, leading the reader to the mass of articles she’s written. Almost all of these articles are about some form of physics, with the exception of a few articles about the science of Notre Dame. This is not Emily Conover’s first article written about thermodynamics: she has plenty of articles written about the topic, from chilling a nanoparticle to absolute zero to how to make scientifically perfect fried rice.
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