Jeff Moden
Beer has some interesting freezing qualities... take it down to somewhere between 26 and 28oF and it's still liquid. Give it a little bit of a sharp rap and all the beer in the bottle will turn to ice in just several seconds.
The "Hot Ice" trick requires a chemical that you can make from regular household items like vinegar and (IIRC) baking soda and (IIRC) Isopropyl alcohol which, of course, is poison to drink. Makes a really cool (no pun intended) effect though. Hmmm... I wonder if it'll still work with Ethanol.
[font="Comic Sans MS"]It does not have to be beer. Supercooled water can be produced - you need distilled water. You probably will not be able to do this in a freezer, the mechanical vibrations from the compressor would be equivalent to the shaking action you want to create yourself to be able to observe the spontaneous formation of ice. You have to use a cold bath of salty water brought down to below the freezing temperature of pure water. What happens is that shaking creates nucleation sites where the phase can change to solid ice.
I just completed viewing all of prof. Grossman's Thermodynamics DVD lectures - this was just one of his many demos.
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