The fastest way to heat certain materials may be to cool them first
To heat a slice of pizza, you probably wouldn’t consider first chilling it in the fridge. But a theoretical study suggests that cooling, as a first step before heating, may be the fastest way to warm up certain materials. In fact, such precooling could lead sometimes to exponentially faster heating, two physicists calculate in a study accepted in Physical Review Letters. The concept is similar to the Mpemba effect, the counterintuitive — and controversial — observation that hot water sometimes freezes faster than cold water (SN: 1/6/17). Scientists still don’t agree on why the Mpemba effect occurs, and it’s difficult to reproduce the effect consistently. The new study is “a way of thinking of effects like the Mpemba effect from a different perspective,” says physicist Andrés Santos of Universidad de Extremadura in Badajoz, Spain, who was not involved with the research. This potential for faster heating doesn’t actually apply to pizza slices, but to certain simplified theoretical models of materials, which scientists...