Ok..but hot water must become cold water before it can freeze, no? Are you saying that certain glasses of cold water have a memory of having been hot, but others do not? How long ago must it have been hot for that to count?
This all just feels like sloppy measurement of some kind.
Calling it "memory" is a misleading way to think about the effect.
It could be better written as: exposing hot water to a large temperature gradient allows the water to change energy states in a way that it cannot do when that temperature gradient is small. Those fun new energy state changes allow the hot water to give up more energy faster and freeze sooner.
So no, the hot water in this case is not becoming cold water in the sense that you mean.
Do you have a background in physics or is this just stuff you read?
I have an undergrad degree in physics and nothing you just said sounds right at all. It all just sounds like gibberish. What kind of "energy states"? Molecules bounce off each other and vibrate around. The measurement of that kinetic energy is called "temperature".
I'm regurgitating what I understood from reading the article. Here are some relevant quotes:
> The abstract findings suggested that the components of a hotter system, by virtue of having more energy, are able to explore more possible configurations and therefore discover states that act as a sort of bypass, allowing the hot system to overtake a cool one as both dropped toward a colder final state.
> “We all have this naive picture that says temperature should change monotonically,” said Raz. “You start at a high temperature, then a medium temperature, and go to a low temperature.” But for something driven out of equilibrium, “it’s not really true to say that the system has a temperature,” and “since that’s the case you can have strange shortcuts.”
This all just feels like sloppy measurement of some kind.