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Hot water can freeze faster than cold water, and no one fully understands why

Ellsworth Toohey
Jan 23, 2026
∙ Paid

Ice cube (Stone36/shutterstock.com)

The Mpemba effect sounds like it should be easy to debunk: hot water freezing faster than cold water? That’s backwards. But under certain conditions, it actually happens, and physicists have been arguing about why for decades.

The effect is named after Erasto Mpemba, a Tanzanian teenager who noticed it in the 1960s whil…

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