UKC

I know there are are lots of people on here who will know the answer to this and be able to explain it  .if yuu know the andwer please don’t spoil it  for others having a go . I know you lot are clever .what I’m intrested in is what people who have a reasonable grasp of science but don’t know the answer to this  think  . before we start Ii know the answer but I  struggled to explain it to my 13 year old son without a bit of help from google AI for sone images / diagrams and ( cluevz) a graph . So without cheating : yesterday we arrived at our holiday Apparment and immediately put sone small beers in the freezer and sone in the fridge  . We then went  out for a few hours and hey presto all the tops had popped off the ones in the Freeser and started to ooze beer slush .  Will123 ( 13 ) immediately asked why . Mike 123 as usual : you’ve been doing loads about solids liquids and gases , what do you think ? 

I failed my mock physics O'Level in 1969 and the school declined to enter me for the real thing, judging it probably correctly as a waste of money. So I feel highly qualified to venture an answer.

Liquids expand as they freeze. Why? I've no idea. 

Hope that helps your son.

I think the tops weren’t strong enough on your beer cans.

The real magic happens when you carefully take a water bottle out of the freezer after some hours and gently remove the lid…

We used to freeze beer when the fridge thermostat broke. If you do it carefully mostly water comes out as slush, and the beer strengthens. Extremely useful in the US when beer was weak.

Yeah; that's much more interesting; why didn't the beer solidify in the bottle, and only did so when the bottle was opened?

What's more interesting is that the same phenomenon that pops the lids off frozen beer is vital for the evolution of life as we know it.

Very complicated situation to explain as you have the ethanol/water discussion (entropy, certainly A-level 30 years ago), solubility of gases in liquids (Henry's law; enthalpy of solutuon), and then the amazing phase diagram for H2O and the underlying explanation (can't remember if H bonds were covered at A-level or first year uni).

Then of course there's the more important lesson about not chilling beer or wasting your life with lager.

You froze real beer? Do you microwave red wine?

It's mostly to do with daemons. They are everywhere, and they get really angry when they get too hot or too cold. Obviously this leads to things like exploding eggs in microwaves, ice floating on water, astronaut bone density loss, the Donald being president and the recent extinction of unicorns.

Of course a Bavarian would mutter "stupid English" and ignore you. Eisbock is a doublebock beer which is frozen and the ice removed to increase the alcohol content and change it's flavour, Schorchbräu from the Franken is the best known for the stronger versions, they've sold 57% alc in the past but their normal ones are around 20-30%.

The other reason to freeze it down is make the beer last indefinetely as the yeast is killed, they will sell you a 2015 43% special edition at a price you'd wince at. The Bavarians have been making the stuff since the late 1800's. 

Beer servers?

my wife makes wine jellies from leftover wine

Leftover wine?

How is that 'a thing'...?

Yes of course I do . How else do you expect me to get it up to room temp when I get it out the fridge 

Fixed it for you... 

Mike 123 as usual : you’ve been doing loads about solids liquids and gases , what do you think ? 

First, water isn't a typical liquid.  Weirdly, it gets bigger (but less dense) as it solidifies.  Hydrogen bonds and stuff.

The bit that took me ages to get my head round when I was struggling with school physics was that the kinetic model suggests that as you heat solids their molecules jiggle about until they melt, and liquid molecules jiggle about more until they escape into gas.  More jiggling about equals being hotter.  However, if you squash a gas so its molecules have less room to jiggle about, it gets hotter...   

Slight tangent, but I left a can of Pepsi in a fridge with a temperamental thermostat.

The fridge turned into a freezer, the Pepsi burst the can and then sprayed the contents all over the inside of the fridge!

Although not as bad as when someone I once worked with accidentally left a bottle of beer on the parcel shelf of his car. You can guess what happened when the sun came round - there was beer everywhere, including all over the dashboard/inside of the windscreen!

It's really not that complex at all! 

In as few words as possible:

The bonds between the molocules take up more room when it is frozen beer as compared to liquid beer, meaning the the frozen beer has a larger volume than the liquid beer.

You compress the molocules into a smaller space they collide into each other and the walls of that space more, so this increases the kenetic energy which is released as heat. 

You're not making them move about less when you compress them, they're moving about just as much (more in fact) just in a smaller space. 

Yes, for water, but it’s not intuitively obvious that this will happen and I don’t think it’s generally true for most liquids ( but maybe I’m wrong about that, it’s been a while…)

Seems pretty obvious to me, but both my parents are Chemistry academics so i grew up being told about this stuff constantly!

Yes, the opposite is true for most liquids, but then most liquids we encounter in are day to day life, and certainly anything we would consider drinking, are largely water.  Beer, for example, is more than 90% water.   

So what is the 'obvious' reason for that difference?

Why is the density of water highest at 4C?

Isn't the right answer 'why?' not generically to do with the liquid-solid phase transition but the almost unbelievable weirdness of water specifically?

jk

If you think water is wierd don't look at metals! Why does the Curie temperature of different metals vary and how does it actually work, how do memory metals work and so on.

I was talking about “that this will happen” part being obvious. The difference for other liquids is not at all obvious.

A guess but I’d say at 4C the molocules are closest together. Bonds are at their smallest, most malleable state, breaking frequently and allowing the molocules to be very close to one another. As you heat the water, the molocules will begin to move around more and thus be further away from one another? 

Like I say a guess but I’m going to google it now to see if I’m right.

Edit: More or less. The malleable part wasn’t correct, but the rest is near enough.

6/10 see me after class.

I feel I'm going to have to go down the 'five whys' route... Or however many 'whys' are required...

Goldilocks zone where the cold enough so that they are at their closest, but the bonds haven’t started to stiffen and push them away from one another. Which I guess begins to happen before you reach the freezing point of 0. Would suggest that water starts to become more viscous from 4 downwards, though probably not to the extent it’s visible by the human eye.

I think it’s to do with the ordering and packing of the H and OH ions. Below and above 4C there is more space between the ions, which explains why icebergs float as they are less dense that water. IIRC water is one of the few compounds which becomes less dense when it freezes another is acetic acid

I think it’s to do with the ordering and packing of the H and OH ions. Below and above 4C there is more space between the ions, which explains why icebergs float as they are less dense that water. IIRC water is one of the few compounds which becomes less dense when it freezes another is acetic acid

I think it’s to do with the ordering and packing of the H and OH ions. Below and above 4C there is more space between the ions, which explains why icebergs float as they are less dense that water. IIRC water is one of the few compounds which becomes less dense when it freezes another is acetic acid

I think it’s to do with the ordering and packing of the H and OH ions. Below and above 4C there is more space between the ions, which explains why icebergs float as they are less dense that water. IIRC water is one of the few compounds which becomes less dense when it freezes another is acetic acid