My mother always asks me not to fill the ice cube tray with water to the brim because it’ll expand and break the box. But doesn’t matter shrink in volume when heat is dissipated, so why does the ice cube expand?
Sorry in advanced, if I word it incorrectly, English is not my first language. Thank you.
In: Physics
Take a box of nails and dump it on the ground. All jumbled together, they don’t take up much space. But if I were to lay out each nail end to end they would take up more space.
It’s the same way with water. Water is a polar molecule, which means one end is positively charged and one end is negatively charged. The negatively charged side of one molecule wants to be next to the positively charged side of another molecule. But water has too much energy for that to happen.
When you freeze it, there isn’t enough energy to keep that from happening and so the molecules align themselves. When they align themselves they take up more space.
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