Kitchen Lab | Kitchen Physics Atlas

The sandbox

Pick a tool, click the counter, and watch heat do the rest.

Pick a tool above, then click anywhere on the counter to place it.

Hot-plate temperature

Probe

Drop the probe tool anywhere to graph its temperature.

Challenges

Badges you earn are saved in your lab notebook.

Set your own challenge (for teachers)

Goal Target °C Max °C Hold for (s)

Set a challenge, build the starting scene, then press "🔗 Copy link" — the link recreates both for your class.

What you are seeing

Not an animation — a numerical solution.

The colours

The view is a thermal camera: deep blue is room temperature, and the scale climbs through violet, red, and orange to white-hot. Materials keep a faint tint of their own so you can see what you placed. Watch the boundary of a hot pan: the halo creeping into the air and along the counter is conduction, computed cell by cell.

Real thermal personalities

Each material carries its real character: copper races heat along its length while wood barely passes it; stone soaks up energy slowly and releases it slowly; water refuses to pass 0 °C until all the ice is melted, and refuses to pass 100 °C — pouring the extra energy into becoming steam instead. Those plateaus are latent heat, and no one scripted them: they fall out of the arithmetic.

History & equations

Joseph Fourier (1822) wrote the equation this page solves; a century later Courant, Friedrichs and Lewy (1928) worked out when a computer (or a room of human calculators) could step it forward in time without the numbers exploding — the rule this simulation obeys on every frame.

∂T/∂t = α ∇²TThe heat equation

Δt ≤ Δx² / 4αCFL stability limit (2D explicit)

The maths behind the lab

Foundations: conservation of energy plus Fourier's law, on a grid.

Each cell's temperature changes by the heat flowing in from its four neighbours: ΔT = (Δt/c) Σ k·(T_neighbour − T). That is the heat equation, discretised — as Δx and Δt shrink it converges to ∂T/∂t = α∇²T. Latent heat is an energy ledger: at 0 °C and 100 °C, incoming energy fills a buffer (melting, boiling) instead of raising T, which is why the probe graph flattens into plateaus exactly like the curve in the Heat & Phase lesson.

The stability rule matters: step too far in time and a cell can overshoot its neighbours' average and oscillate to infinity. The lab's step obeys Δt < 0.25·c/k for its most conductive material — copper sets the speed limit.

Things to try

Five experiments that surprise people.

Drop ice into boiling water

The water temperature crashes, then stalls — the probe shows a plateau while the ice pays its melting debt before the climb resumes.

Race the spoons

Stand a copper and a wooden spoon in the same hot pan. Watch the heat front sprint up one and crawl up the other — then check the Spoon race badge.

Listen to the kettle

Turn the sound on and heat a pan of water: nucleation crackle from about 60 °C, a rising hiss near 90, and a rolling rumble at the boil — synthesised live from the water's real state.

Shield with stone

Put a stone slab between the hot plate and the pan. Everything slows — thermal mass buys time in both directions, the same trick a pizza stone plays.

Boil it dry

Leave a pan boiling and watch cells of water leave as steam until nothing is left — then see how fast the empty pan overheats. This is why dry pans burn.

Send someone your setup

Build an experiment and press "Copy link" — the link recreates your exact arrangement, hot-plate setting and all, on any device. Handy for setting classroom challenges.