After remembering a science class where my teacher got me to stick my hand in a bowl of liquid nitrogen and take it out unharmed (due to the gas my hand cause to evaporate), I’ve began to wonder how long I’d have to leave it in to make it shatter if I banged it against a table. Could I let it thaw out? or would all my cells be mush and so I might as well make it shatter for the shock value?
From the juvanile mind of Krurst.
Last question first - might as well shatter it, cause those cells are toast. Well, mush.
As for how long, it’d take quite a while to get that cold. Your body would be constantly pumping heat into the arm… You’d be better off chopping off your hand and immersing that.
I don’t think there’s any reason why a frozen limb would easily shatter like you see so often in movies; if you take a frozen leg of lamb and drop it, it hardly sustains any damage at all.
yeah, but that leg of lamb (probably) hasn’t been frozen by liquid nitrogen - more likely, it is only frozen to about -5 C…
Well I know a tennis ball frozen in liquid nitrogen will shatter. I’ve seen it. My guess is that the extreme cold weakens the chemical bonds in the object.
A tennis ball is a fairly simple structure compared to a human limb; certainly I’d expect a frozen piece of skin to be brittle, but it seems unreasonable to me to assume that freezing a body part renders it as fragile as glass (although having said that, a large solid piece of glass is actually quite hard to break).
A frozen banana can be used as a hammer; it will snap if it’s abused, but it won’t shatter into a million sharp fragments.
No, I think this is a property of the bulk material.
Blood would stop pumping through the hand pretty quickly as the blood froze.
I’d hazard a guess that the hand would be uniformly at liquid N[sub]2[/sub] temp in less than 5 minutes.
Then, wack it with a hammer and I’m sure it’d cleanly break, but I don’t think it would shatter like glass.
I have stuck many things in liquid nitrogen, but no body parts…yet.
They all tend to break rather than shatter.
I might be misremembering about the ball, actually. I was in elementary school at the time.
I’m surprised you were able to stick your hand into liquid nitrogen with impunity; my sister had a verruca removed by freezing once and the doctor accidentally splashed a little of the liquid (which I think was nitrogen, but it may not have been) onto her leg; it was only in contact for a fraction of a second, but it left a trail of white, dead skin (which later sloughed off in the same ways as does a blister).
Minor hijack but related: Can you put your hand in molten lead and remove it unharmed? I’ve heard that you can in a couple of places.
Ah, the wonders of the Leidenfrost effect. Dunking your hand in liquid nitrogen is trivial; I do it on average at least once a week. If you are sufficiently motivated you can also put a small quantity of LN[sub]2[/sub] on your tongue and exhale clouds of water vapor. I’ve never had problems with that trick, but I’ve heard of people cracking their teeth. It also stings a bit if you swallow! I’ve seen Jearl Walker do the molten lead demo, but that scares the hell out of me!