Physical principles are involved in almost any aspect of cooking. Here we analyse the specific process of baking pizzas, deriving in simple terms the baking times for two different situations: for a brick oven in a pizzeria and a modern metallic oven at home. Our study is based on fundamental thermodynamic principles relevant to the cooking…

Phase changes in water are experienced in everyday life but students often struggle to understand mechanisms that regulate them. Human thermal comfort is closely related to humidity, evaporative heat loss and heat transfer. The purpose of the present study is to assist students in the evaluation of human thermal comfort. Such a goal is achievable…

In this article I describe an experiment involving the Leidenfrost phenomenon, which is the long lifetime of a water drop when it is deposited on a metal that is much hotter than the boiling point of water. The experiment was carried out with high-school students. The Leidenfrost point is measured and the heat laws are used to estimate the…