So we consider heat to be energy. But what is the reaction of putting ice cubes into a drink? Is this not energy too?
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I could be (probably) wrong but wouldn’t the contrast of temperature, the drink being warmer than the ice, be a transfer of energy which is what melts the ice?
Heat energy always transfers from a hot environment to a cold one. In the case where you place a cold ice cube into a glass of water, heat energy transfers from the water to the ice cube, causing the water within the ice cube to change from a solid state to a liquid state.
The ice has energy, otherwise it would be at absolute zero (-273 degrees C). It feels colder because it has less energy than the drink. Leave any two objects, at different temperatures, together in the same box and the resulting temp will be a blend of the two. The ice cools the drink and the drink melts the ice.
For example, according to ChatGPT 100g of ice at zero degrees PLUS 1000g of water at 20 degrees gives you 1100 grams at 19 degrees.
If you drop an ice cube into a cup of warm water, the ice has less energy than the water. So energy is transferred from the water (cooling it) to the ice (warming it). The ice would be an absorber of the water’s energy.
It’s just two different energy levels meeting in the middle.
(energy in this case means “intermolecular kinetic energy”, which is basically what heat is)
Why does this happen? Think of a pool ball hitting stationary pool ball. After the collison, the stationary ball is now moving, and the moving ball is moving slower. Now replace the pool balls with atoms.
Yes, ice is most definitely composed of energy, too.
I think you’re getting tripped up by the fact that we always describe positive heat transport as hot to cold. It’s perfectly acceptable to describe negative heat transport from cold to hot, it’s just not the convention.
For example, it’s easy to picture heat (energy) from the environment warming a cold can of soda. Now just picture the negative as cold propagating out from the can and cooling the immediate surroundings. Both are energy transport, one positive, one negative.
both the drink and the ice cube have energy. the ice cube just has much less energy. what is happening is it is balancing between both the water and ice. so your drink ends up with less average energy and you interpret that as colder.
imagine the ice cube is a guy with $1 dollar, and you have $99. you average your money and now both of you have $50. You have lost money, even though the total amount did increase
There are two kinds of energy, potential energy and kinetic energy. Potential energy isn’t a part of this story.
In this case, we’re dealing with kinetic energy which means movement. Even though a glass of water may look very still, at the tiniest level, the particles are bouncing around. The more they’re moving the warmer the water is.
So your glass of water has a certain amount of energy in the movement of those water molecules.
The molecules in ice are moving a lot less. It has a lot less energy than the water.
When you drop in the ice cube, some of the energy from the glass of water flows to the water molecules in the ice, making them move a little bit more. But in giving up that energy, the molecules from the surrounding water move a little slower. The molecules in the ice start moving enough that they’re now water. the flow of energy from the warmer water of the original water, to the colder water of the melted ice keeps going until all the water in the cup is more or less the same temperature.
Technically, you DID add energy because ice doesn’t have zero energy, but the cooling down happened because you introduced something that had less energy.
Imagine a sink full of rubber balls all bouncing around fast that’s the glass of water. Put in a few balls that are barely moving that’s your ice. The fast moving balls will hit the slower ones and transfer some of their energy. They’ll ricochet back a little slower and the slow ones will start moving faster. This is more or less what’s happening in the molecules of an ice cube placed in a room temp glass of water.
You’re right, ice has energy. If you consider a warm cup of water as a system and you add ice, the cup’s overall energy increases. The reaction that occurs when you add ice is called heat transfer. Since the water is warmer than the ice cubes, heat moves from the water to ice causing the molecules in the ice to vibrate faster and eventually changes it’s state to a liquid (solid molecules move slower than liquid molecules). I think this is the second law in thermodynamics.
Cold isn’t cold, it’s just less hot to a point where it feels cold to our bodies. If that makes sense. Image energy as a bunch of people running around like crazy. The hotter it gets the faster they run, the colder it gets the slower they run. When water turns to ice the people will arange themselves in a very specific pattern and stay there, but they’re still moving. Shuffling their feet, breathing, etc. When you put an ice cube into water, the outermost people with start to move faster again as they warm up. Eventually every person will be moving the same speed again and you’ll have no more ice.
No clue if that actually made sense lol
You’re thinking of a concept called entropy, which is mot exactly the same as energy.
When you drop the ice cube in, you are disrupting a stable system of room temperature water, which increases the entropy of the system. Entropy in this case is referring to the fact that eventually all the energy will be evenly distributed in the glass of water, and the system is not yet. When the water is all room temperature again and the ice is melted, you can call this the low entropy state.
It is true that moving energy out of the water in the freezer takes extra energy, and doing this creates more “disorder” in the ice cube as it now has a greater equalization potential compared to the room temperature water; this is the high entropy state. You may notice that the farther apart things are in temperature, the faster they equalize, and they slow down as they near the same temperature.
You could technically consider each ice cube a sort of entropy battery to “store cold” but really you’ve just traded some energy for thermal entropy
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