I’m thinking that no, it doesn’t. Which begs the question of why we do it? Is it a psychological thing?
It works well enough for CPUs and graphics cards.
Air cooled engines quite literally stay cool by being blown on.
Besides evaporation, blowing on something which is very hot will bring it closer to room (or breath) temperature by removing the air right next to it which has been heated up already and is ‘protecting’ the hot item a bit from direct exposure to the room air. When you blow that hot air away the hot item then touches the room air and heats that up, which cools it down.
The same applies to cold things, you can melt ice cream for example much faster by blowing on it even if you use a fan instead of hot breath.
It doesn’t beg the question, Mr Tyson. Stick to boxing.
You can test your hypothesis of “no, it doesn’t” pretty easily. Feel free to report back with results and method used.
Methods:
- Make a cup of Hot Chocolate
- Get two spoons, put them in your hot chocolate to warm up to remove the variable of heat transferring into the spoon.
- Take one spoon out, fill it up, blow on it for a few seconds, then put it in your mouth.
- Take the second one out, leave it out for the same amount of time you would have if you had blown on it, then put it in your mouth.
Report on temperature difference. If you had an instant-read thermometer you could even be more certain of the results.
