What do you think of this fact?
Most experiments are over in an afternoon. This one started almost a hundred years ago, and it’s still not finished.
A solid that drips
In 1927, Thomas Parnell, the University of Queensland’s first professor of physics, heated a sample of pitch, a tar-like substance, and poured it into a glass funnel with a sealed stem. Then he let it settle for 3 years. In 1930 he cut the stem open, and the pitch began to drip.
The point was to show that something can feel solid and still flow. At room temperature, pitch feels hard enough to shatter with a hammer, yet according to the university it is 100 billion times more viscous than water. That’s why the dripping is so slow. The first drop took 8 years to fall. According to the university, only 9 drops have fallen in total, the most recent in April 2014. Guinness World Records lists it as the longest-running laboratory experiment.
Nobody saw it happen
A drop falls roughly every nine years, but according to the university, various glitches have prevented anyone from seeing one fall. The most painful miss came in 2000: a webcam was watching, but as Australian Geographic reports, a data malfunction meant the footage of that drop was lost.
John Mainstone looked after the experiment for more than 50 years. He died about eight months before the ninth drop, without ever seeing a drop fall. Today Professor Andrew White is the third custodian. The university expects the next drop sometime in the 2020s and streams the funnel live online.
Bonus fact: Patience is built in. According to Guinness World Records, there is enough pitch left in the funnel for the experiment to run for another hundred years.
Somewhere in Australia, a lump of tar is getting ready for its tenth big moment. Probably while everyone is looking away.