It's been a hot summer. And now, it's time for a cold drink, but you have a problem. The drinks aren't cold.
You could stick them in the fridge to cool them down. Or, if you're in a hurry, you could stick them in the freezer. How long would you need to cool them down to a temperature that makes it worthwhile to drink them?
Obviously, that depends on how you choose to cool them down, but it also depends on what your choice of drink might be. What kind of container it comes in also matters, and how big that container is will make a difference. The answer to the question will change if you're trying to cool a can of beer, a bottle of wine, a 2-liter of soda or just a half-liter of plain water.
There are a lot of physics involved, which is where the math of Newton's Law of Cooling would be handy to know. With it, you can work out how long it would take to cool your drink of choice down to whatever temperature you find most desirable for consuming it.
Or you could take advantage of the science knowledge and programming talents of PhD students Álvaro Díez Gepe, Tibor Pál, and Dominik Czernia, who built a tool to do that math for water, soft drinks, juice, beer, wine, or spirits. We've embedded their tool below, but if you're accessing this article on a site that republishes our RSS news feed, you may want to access it directly at our site, where it appears within the context of this article, or its home site at Omni Calculator.
That leaves out the question of what the optimal temperature to cool each type of beverage down to, but they have that covered as well. They put together the following graphic aid to help!
They also suggest a number of hacks to get your chosen beverage to its optimal consumption temperature more quickly than simply sticking it in the fridge or the freezer.
Previously on Political Calculations
This isn't the first time we've featured a calculator created by the talented minds behind the online tools at Omni Calculator. We've previously presented Hanna Pamula's Black Friday Sale Calculator to deal with serious shopping situations, and recently drew upon its knowledge base related to Avogadro's Number.
Image Credit: Photo by Chander Mohan on Unsplash