Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Mpemba Effect

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

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podcast. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports Network. 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 1960s. And his name was Arasto Impimba. Is it Impemma? It's Impimpa. Okay. The reason why we're we're talking about Arasso 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 them try to figure it out. You know, the first law of thermodynamics is you don't talk about thermodynamics. Very nice. I was thinking about that movie the other day. I was like, I used to be so into that. Same. Same. 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? Yeah, 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. Right. And he was right. I think he was. So, yeah, we're talking about Arasso Impema because he discovered what's called the Impenba 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 René Descartes. And what they all noticed and what Erastom and Pemba got 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 13-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 was part of science, but regardless, 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 an ice cream. Now that I think about it. 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, Arasto. Yeah, I'm not curious like you. No.

And Arasso was undeterred. Over the years, teacher after teacher, as he made his way through. middle school and 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 Dara Salam, he was a British guy named Dennis Osborne. He came to give a lecture, and Erasto 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 Mpimba hit you up about this ice cream business?

Yes. Yeah. They're all drinking wine and rolling their eyes. So annoying. So annoying. All the scientific curiosity out of this kid. I know. Luckily, Dennis Osborne 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 1969, I guess Mpimba is 19 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, heck yeah. Well, let's take a break, and we'll talk a little more about the impemba effect itself. How about that? All right.

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And part of the very process of slowing down, temperature, by the way, is 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 and are solid blocks of ice. Yeah, it would just make intuitive sense that something colder and closer to that temperature, do it faster.

You can also observe this if you go out in, let's say you live in Minneapolis and it's January and 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. sample. 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 Arrasso 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 their 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 Mr. Freeze who they're racing. Isn't that funny? Oh, wow. So they're clearly fans of the Impenba effect. There's a track, clearly a track guy dressed up as Mr. Freeze, and they let a person from the stands, they bring him down in the outfield, and they give them. them a pretty long, like a quarter of the distance head start. And then Mr. Freeze starts, and

you almost always lose. But a young woman the other day beat Mr. 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 Mr. Freeze went. She was running at a decent clip, and then as soon as they hit the timer for Mr. 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 sponsored by Home Depot racing. They have multiple races at Braves games now? Yeah, they got Mr. Freeze and they have the Home Depot hammer drill. I can't remember what the third one was. So silly. I got to 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 a very big disappointment. But, you know, what are you going to do? Poor 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 in the Impenba 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 impenba effect. 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 or causing it to freeze faster. It could be that our freezers work harder on warmer air than cooler air, so it'll freeze fast. in a freezer, they don't know, but they're like, there's no such thing as the impenba 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 going to do some like this, you've got to agree what that, when you're technically freezing and who got there first. It's not like Mr. Freeze running across that finish line and hitting his chest to that tape. No. That's obvious. So you've got to agree on freeze first.

Is that like, hey, is it the first one to reach 32 degrees Fahrenheit, zero degrees Celsius, if it starts to form ice crystals, if it's good enough to put in a cocktail without getting too watered down? And I'm going to 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 Impamba effect. Yeah, that's not what we're talking about, MIT. No, the rest of the world.

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 what happens once they reach freezing. So 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 32 degrees Fahrenheit 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 2025 basically figured out a measurement standard that any lab could use to, test the impemba 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 impemba 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 impenba 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, 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 in 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 2023. But he was older, right? 20, he has 73.

That's not fair, I guess. Not a bad life. But our scientific curiosity had is off to you, sir. Yes. And that means short stuff is that happened. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the Iheart Radio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Thank you.