The Slowest Experiment Ever Performed: The Pitch Drop

The pitch drop experiment is one of the longest-running laboratory experiments in history, designed to demonstrate the extremely high viscosity of pitch, a substance that appears solid but is actually a very slow-flowing liquid. First set up in 1927 by physicist Thomas Parnell at the University of Queensland, the experiment involves a funnel filled with pitch that gradually forms and releases drops over the course of many years, with each drop taking roughly a decade to fall. The setup highlights how everyday intuition about solids and liquids can be misleading, revealing that some materials flow so slowly that their motion is imperceptible without long-term observation. It continues to run today, serving as a striking reminder of both the strange behavior of materials and the patience sometimes required in scientific inquiry.

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