| MadSci Network: Other |
I hope you are asking this question out of pure curiosity (which is not a bad thing!) . Please do not try this experiment at home -- or anywhere else. The main special thing about liquid nitrogen is that it is extremely cold: -196 deg C. It does not cause chemical reactions, or any physical effect other than those associated with extreme cold. When you make things cold, you turn liquids into solids, and you turn flexible rubbery materials into rigid glassy materials. Sometimes this makes things brittle, sometimes not. I do not know how brittle someone's hand would get if you made it extremely cold with liquid nitrogen. I do not think it has been tried. I certainly hope not. But I think that it would not get very brittle, and that it would not shatter if you hit it with a hammer. My reason? Well, the closest thing I can think of to what would happen if you put a hand in liquid nitrogen would be what happens if you put a joint of meat in the deep freeze. I have seen how very cold meat behaves, and it is not easy to shatter. There is fibrous material in meat, and in hands, that would tend to hold them together fairly effectively even if they were frozen into a rigid state.
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