Can cryogenic cooling miraculously improve car parts, sports equipment, and musical instruments?
Dear Cecil: I’ve been hearing a lot lately about miraculous improvements in auto engine parts, golf balls and clubs, razors, and even brass and stringed musical instruments, all by subjecting the object in question to a deep freeze of 300 degrees or more. Is there any solid evidence for this? Sounds like pseudoscience to me. — Mickey Houlahan, Chicago Cecil replies: I wouldn’t go that far. As a former high school science fair geek, I’ve got a soft spot for cryogenics, as the science of deep freezing is known. Anything that lets you hammer rubber nails into a two-by-four with a mercury mallet — I’m telling you, with the right crowd, a stunt like that kills. More seriously, cryogenics has been the subject of continuing research for over a century. The federal government bought a hydrogen liquefier in 1904; to this day NASA operates a Cryogenics Test Laboratory at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In short, cryogenics is a legit field of study. That doesn’t mean a cryogenically treated
