Starts With A Bang!

How cool is boiling water?

Okay, you know that some of the most interesting things happen when two extremes meet each other. For example: matter + anti-matter?

Total annihilation. Which, of course, equals total awesomeness.

Well, boiling water is not only hot, but it contains an awful lot of energy. If you want to freeze it, you first have to cool it down to its freezing temperature, which means taking an awful lot of energy out of it (since water has a high specific heat, which means it heats and cools slowly). After that, you’ve still got to freeze it, which means taking all the latent heat out of it.

That’s the standard story for cooling it at a relatively slow rate. But what if we used extreme cooling? You know, what if we set up a huge temperature difference, like boiling water vs. Antarctica? And if instead of just trying to cool the boiling water at once, something very special happens if you supercool it in tiny little drops:

It turns, almost immediately, to snow! So if you took a whole pot of boiling water, and threw it up in the air on a cold enough day (cold enough means at least around -30), it would rain down as snow by time it reached you! Don’t believe me? See for yourself:

Know what’s super neat about this? It only works with very hot water! Cold water will just form drops of ice to pelt you with! Try it out this winter!

(Kids, I’d tell you to get your parents’ permission, but if you’re old enough to read this, you’re old enough to face the consequences of dealing with boiling water!)