The World's Longest-Running Lab Experiment Is Almost 100 Years Old (sciencealert.com) 51
alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: It all started in 1927, when physicist Thomas Parnell at the University of Queensland in Australia filled a closed funnel with the world's thickest known fluid: pitch, a derivative of tar that was once used to seal ships against the seas. Three years later, in 1930, Parnell cut the funnel's stem, like a ribbon at an event, heralding the start of the Pitch Drop Experiment. From then on, the black substance began to flow. At least, that is, in a manner of speaking. At room temperature pitch might look solid, but it is actually a fluid 100 billion times more viscous than water.
It took eight years for the first droplet to finally hit the beaker below. Then, they dripped at a cadence of once every eight years or so, slowing down only after air conditioning was installed in the building in the 1980s. Today, 96 years after the funnel was cut, only nine drops in total have seeped out. The last was in 2014. Scientists expect another will fall sometime in the 2020s, but they are still waiting. No one has ever actually seen a droplet fall directly, despite all the watchful eyes. The experiment is now live-streamed, but various glitches in the past meant that each fateful moment has slipped us by.
It took eight years for the first droplet to finally hit the beaker below. Then, they dripped at a cadence of once every eight years or so, slowing down only after air conditioning was installed in the building in the 1980s. Today, 96 years after the funnel was cut, only nine drops in total have seeped out. The last was in 2014. Scientists expect another will fall sometime in the 2020s, but they are still waiting. No one has ever actually seen a droplet fall directly, despite all the watchful eyes. The experiment is now live-streamed, but various glitches in the past meant that each fateful moment has slipped us by.
Have seen this in person (Score:4, Interesting)
It's kinda fun. There are events that run when they expect another drop to fall.
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It is the dream of every scientist - build the one experiment that you, your students and their students can retire on.
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This isn't really one of those. This is funded at curio level (that is to say... not at all) and the custodians have all been people who already had senior positions in their field.
These days you sort of need to invent a whole new field for that to happen, at least in my experience... Labs don't tend to outlast their named leader (but conversely, those named leaders literally never retire).
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I wasn't being serious.
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I think I've just gotten used to the idea that some members of the public really do believe that ivory tower academia is the norm.
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Yeah, forget it, it was a poor attempt at a joke.
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yer all good bud. no stress.
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Do they have commentators there? I could see that being a boring, but extremely stable job. The color man must have some vicious anecdotes to keep the crowd interest going.
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I do remember it being part of a museum tour I saw as a kid... Science Communicators have been a thing in Australia at least that long, but they tend to be attached to the facility or museum hosting the artifact.
Right now it's on display in the University of Queensland... In the foyer of the Parnell building, which is an active lab facility. Anyone can view it but I don't think it's specifically attended.
This is pretty normal in Australian universities. I've sort of lost count of the amount of long term exp
I suppose it does count as an experiment (Score:4, Insightful)
But what exactly are we learning from it?
Re:I suppose it does count as an experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes, experiments are worth doing not because we don't know what the results of the experiment will be, but because young future scientists are constantly being born, and will learn from witnessing the experiment. For some, the fanfare around the latest drip will be the spark that lights a lifelong desire to pursue science. That alone makes it worthwhile.
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Why not? When I first read about this experiment a few years ago, I didn't realize that pitch was a highly viscous liquid. We see it used all the time on roads and on roofs, and it seems more like an amorphous solid from a practical standpoint. So yes, among many other lessons, young future scientists might indeed learn that pitch is a very thick (viscous) liquid. It's one of many object lessons along the way to a better understanding of science. Maybe, it also teaches about the nature of experimentation it
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Pitch and its flow are familiar to those who either ground their own telescope mirrors, or read about lenses and mirrors. It is used to make laps that hold ultra fine abrasives (rouge, cerium oxide) and conform to the figured optical surface for final figuring and polishing.
Traditionally, this pitch was derived by distilling gum collected from pine and other conifers, giving turpentine (solvent, lamp fuel), pine tar (wood preservative, baseball bat dope, veterinary uses), and pitch. I have used pine pitch,
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So is your comment just FYI or is it related to the question of whether it's a useful experiment or not?
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There are at least 3 substances called "pitch": tree gum (pine) pitch, coal tar pitch, and petroleum pitch (naturally occurring surface seeps, and as a product from petroleum refining). Articles and discussion seem to assume petroleum pitch (bitumen), but a university physics department of the 1920s with an optical shop, would likely have had pine pitch. I do not know if they all behave similarly.
I'd call this more a demonstration than an experiment, given that the viscosity is temperature dependent, and at
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pitch is thick and the observed flow rate is like that. That's a nice result. Nothing you cannot calculate with some material science in an hour, but the experiment is more fun.
Re:I suppose it does count as an experiment (Score:5, Informative)
Mostly it's a teaching tool/exhibit these days.
This is the experiment that was actually used to determine the relative viscosity of pitch, and there are some other actual materials science findings that were produced from it... admittedly quite some time ago.
Re:I suppose it does count as an experiment (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually do think it is an interesting question - you need continuity of several things (broader social stability, specific organizational stability, a community of people interested enough to bother keeping it going) without any of the usual things that keep something going (profit motive, government edict, etc.)
But I like proof-by-doing sorts of things in general.
Re:I suppose it does count as an experiment (Score:4, Interesting)
There are some experiments that are not possible to complete within a scientist's lifetime. All of the data-gathering over decades or even centuries is a gift to future generations. Many observations over a very long time-frame in astronomy, weather, solar activity, etc., have led to new understandings and theories.
I'm reminded of a musical analog to this story: ASLSP [wikipedia.org] by John Cage. The name is roughly a mnemonic for As Slow As Possible. Although it was originally a piano piece intended for concert or recital performance, it was adapted for organ and is currently being "performed" in St. Burchardi Church in Halberstadt, Germany. The performance began in 2001 and is set to end in 2640, after 639 years.
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In this case this has nothing to do with the scientist. This is a demonstration exhibit at a university physics building. There's thousands of people who learn about the concept that pitch is a liquid not a solid from this every year. It's actually how I learned it, and the kicker is, I wasn't even studying physics at that university. I just had an engineering class in the building.
University experiments are about repeating what is known for demonstration. Not everything requires unique knowledge improvemen
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Yes absolutely, it's a demonstration exhibit, and that's an important objective. But this thread is about how it is also an experiment. And at least one of the points I made about a multi-generational project apply to it also as a demonstration exhibit, specifically how it's a gift for future generations.
I was picking up on some of the points abulafia raised regarding the challenges of such a multi-generational project, and added some about the benefits. And about the sense of humility one gets from a proje
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We're leaning how slowly something can drip. It's just like when you ask someone "how small can you jump?" or "how quietly can you clap?"
Re:I suppose it does count as an experiment (Score:4, Funny)
That there are worse jobs than watching paint dry.
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But what exactly are we learning from it?
That a fluid can be viscose while appearing solid. Are you the kind of person who goes into a Chemistry lecture and thinks the point of mixing potassium iodate, malonic acid/manganese sulphate, and hydrogen peroxide together is to get you to think that blue is a pretty colour?
There are hundreds of thousands of students who learned about pitch and its viscosity from walking past this in the Physics building at UQ over the past 100 years.
But you I'm sure know everything in life already, we all did, but at som
Re:I suppose it does count as an experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
But what exactly are we learning from it?
Patience.
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Remembered this on that would seem older (Score:5, Interesting)
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I once read that it had to be covered with a glass bell because it was so distracting to those around it. We need to figure out what the heck was put into that pile.
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Here's another long-running experiment [nih.gov] to test how long seeds can be stored.
Re:Remembered this on that would seem older (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Remembered this on that would seem older (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Remembered this on that would seem older (Score:4, Interesting)
The Rothamsted Classical Experiments [rothamsted.ac.uk] have been going since 1843.
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The problem is that isn't really an experiment anymore - it started with an experiment and was completed, and is now just a curiosity.
The pitch experiment though is an active experiment on viscous fluid flow.
There are other long running experiments - there's one where a bunch of seeds were sealed up and buried and once every 5 years one bottle opened and seeds planted. The goal is to see how long the seeds remain viable. After a few years the period was lengthened to 10 years and I think now it's every 20 y
Impressive job security! (Score:2)
We already performed this experiment (Score:2, Interesting)
Pitch pans have been used since the nineteen-hundreds in construction to weatherproof roof penetrations. You need some electrical conduit or some such on the roof, esp. a flat commercial roof, you'd build a sheetmetal enclosure and fill it with pitch after extending the conduit through the roof plate.
Some of the pitch always drips through the roof eventually, sticking to everything in sight, but never quite as well as to human clothing and skin. One contractor I knew would'nt allow it on his job sites, ref
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No this *IS* the experiment we performed. It just happens to still be running. Maybe your contractors in the early 1900s learned something from this which was also done in the early 1900s.
New experiment: (Score:5, Funny)
Will a pitch droplet refuse to detach while being observed? Just how long can it be held suspended due to observation? Are quantum effects involved? :-P
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Will a pitch droplet refuse to detach while being observed?
Possibly. Note that modern attempts to monitor "mysteriously" fail.
Are quantum effects involved?
It may be the same QE as what happens to missing socks.
Nah - I blame... (Score:2)
Gremlins... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
No - not the ones the films were made about...
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Interesting that Roald Dahl helped popularize them. And Disney. And Bob Clampett, among others. These are my favorite gremmies:
"The 1981 animated film Heavy Metal contains a segment titled "B-17" had creatures referred to as "Gremlins" in which the sole surviving pilot of a battle weary aircraft is ravaged by the reanimated corpses of his fellow crew."
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Will a pitch droplet refuse to detach while being observed?
Possibly. Note that modern attempts to monitor "mysteriously" fail.
Are quantum effects involved?
It may be the same QE as what happens to missing socks.
If there's one thing Al Bundy proved, it's that missing socks power alien's spaceships.
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You have no idea how right you are. In 2000 it got camera shy and waited for the webcam to go offline to drop causing everyone to not observe it happening. https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org] (the story was about a different experiment but there was a passing comment about UQ's there.
It is pitch dark... (Score:2)
Does the existence of pitch drops, implies the existence of (presumably Australian) drop grues?
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All I can say is... Nobody has ever seen one.
World's longest running Slashdot report? (Score:4, Informative)
Given we've been reporting on this every 11-13 years here: :-)
2013: https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
2002: https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
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Watching grass grow is more fun. (Score:1)
What is the point of this science experiment?
We already know that pitch is slow. Are the experimenters also slow?
pitch (Score:2)
This is why he is credited with the invention of slow-pitch softball.
Valentines Day gift (Score:2)
I made a pitch drop experiment as a Valentine's day gift for my girlfriend. I made the card look like a Maxwell House coffee ad with the slogan "our love will be good to the last drop"
Was kinda annoying gathering the pieces. The main dome I was lucky to get on sale from Michael's. Amazon for the glass funnel, had to get a 3 pack, and the spout part was really long, had to cut it, ruined one funnel. Got brass welding rods to make a tripod holder. 100ml beakers only came in a 6 pack, makes for nice shot glass