# @stem_antics on Instagram

- **Type:** Video
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DdSfOiygYfx
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/70577850-stem-antics-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/949c1ba9a8.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-09-15T01:06:33.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Stem Antics (@stem_antics) — https://gondola.cc/stem_antics

## Caption

Crack an egg into liquid nitrogen and it does not freeze on contact. It floats.

Liquid nitrogen boils at 77 K. The egg arrives roughly 216 K above that, far beyond the threshold where boiling stays orderly, so the first layer of nitrogen flashes to gas and builds a vapour film before any liquid touches the shell contents. This is the Leidenfrost regime, identified by Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost in 1756, and the film is an excellent insulator. Heat flux collapses by roughly two orders of magnitude against the nucleate boiling a merely cold surface would deliver. The egg skates on its own exhaust.

The energy accounting underneath:

- Nitrogen expands approximately 690 times from liquid to room-temperature gas, so the violent churn is a very small mass becoming a very large volume.
- Its latent heat of vaporisation is only 199 kJ/kg against water at 2,260 kJ/kg, meaning it carries heat away poorly per unit mass and boils off quickly.
- Dragging a 50 g egg from 293 K to 77 K costs on the order of 30 kJ once the 334 kJ/kg released by freezing water is included. That is roughly 150 g of nitrogen, near 190 mL, consumed per egg.

The geometry of the freeze front matters more than the temperature. The outer skin cools at a few hundred kelvin per second and nucleates fine crystals, while the core cools far slower because ice, protein and that vapour film all sit in the path. Slow growth produces large dendritic crystals that shred the albumen protein network, which is why the white thaws watery and never rebuilds.

The yolk fares worse. Below about minus 6 C its low-density lipoproteins aggregate irreversibly and the yolk gels into rubber. Industry blocks this by adding 10 percent salt or sugar before freezing.

True vitrification demands something near a million kelvin per second. Nitrogen alone is not fast enough, and that gap is the entire reason cryopreservation needs chemistry rather than cold.

#stemantics #cryogenics #thermodynamics #foodscience #materialsscience

## Stats

- **Views:** 12,689
- **Likes:** 95
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## Tags

materialsscience, cryogenics, thermodynamics, stemantics, foodscience

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