Chemistry Project Ideas: How to Cool a Beverage Quickly
January 1st, 2008While searching for some easy physics or chemistry project ideas that my mother could use for teaching her classes, I remembered that several months ago, she had emailed me a video that was supposed to demonstrate how the second law of thermodynamics could be used for fast cooling of beverages. Fortunately, I had bookmarked it, so I returned to watch it again today.
Upon watching it for the second time, I noticed some things about the experiment that I had not really paid attention to before, and became especially intrigued by this little chemistry project idea after reading through the comments about the video at Metacafe.
The comments section contains several bits of ignorance posted by people who apparently did not understand the intent of the experiment or simply lack knowledge of the underlying scientific principles involved. I would like to address some of these issues here because there seems to be some genuine confusion and controversy about this.
