Watching pitch drip is even more exciting than watching paint dry...

There is this experiment that has been running continuously since 1927 when a Professor Parnell set up a funnel containing some pitch with a beaker in a container and then left it at the University of Queensland, Australia to see how it behaved.


http://www.geekosystem.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/pitch-experiment.png

Pitch, better known to most people as bitumen or tar is when wet a thick sticky viscous material. When heated during road building it provides one of my most favourite smells in the world, see here. When dry pitch looks and behaves like a brittle solid. If hit with something hard like a hammer it will smash.

However pitch is a material that really blurs the line between a solid and a liquid. Under gravity the 'solid' pitch will very slowly flow and over the years the pitch has dripped a total of eight drops. Apparently Thomas Parnell lived long enough to see two of those eight drips. It took seventeen years!!

The last drip happened on the 28th November 2000 and although cameras were trained on the experiment a failure in the equipment meant that the dropping of the drip was missed. In fact out of all eight drips that have occurred not a single one of them has been directly observed, that's right none, zip! Not even Parnell actually witnessed the falling drop.

Well apparently it has all got very exciting in Queensland because the next drop is about to fall. No one can predict exactly when it will happen but apparently it is close. The digital cameras now 13 years more modern are ready, trained to capture the moment. The lead scientist, Professor John Mainstone believes that the drop will hang from four thin 'strings' of pitch and when one of those breaks the other three will not be able to support the weight and the drip will drop.

The best bit? There is a webcam. You can watch the drip yourself. You could be amongst the very first human beings to watch a drop of 85 year old pitch fall into a beaker. Quite remarkable and it might be 13 years or so before it happens again. How could you possibly miss it.

Find the experiment at this website and check it out.

 

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