Croatian man wins worldwide competition seeking best explanation of The Mpemba Effect
The Royal Society of Chemistry announced that Croatian Nikola Bregović has won its worldwide competition to find the best explanation of the famed Mpemba Effect, by which hot water freezes faster than cold water.
In London for the announcement was Erasto Mpemba, the Tanzanian who discovered the effect 50 years ago this year when a schoolboy.
His discovery was scorned at first but he pressed his case with Denis Osborne, a British physics lecturer in Tanzania, and they went on to co-write a paper on the effect published in 1969.
The phenomenon has been known since Aristotle failed to explain it and all persons trying to sort it out since have been defeated.
Nikola, who will get a £1,000 prize, works at the Laboratory of Physical Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry of the University of Zagreb.
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