Worth Waiting For: Pitch Drop Experiment Started in 1944 Finally Comes to Fruition
Wait for it... wait for it... wait for it... there it is!
It’s not the most famous “pitch drop” experiment in the world — that’s the original at the University of Queensland in Australia — but the fact that hard pitch-tar is a viscous liquid has been definitively proven. Researchers at Trinity College in Ireland set up a web cam to catch a never-before-seen glimpse of a drop of the hard, black substance, which is almost two hundred times thicker than honey, falling through the funnel in which it’s been sitting for almost seven decades.
Started in 1944, the simple test has left a few drops of pitch in the jar below it over the course of decades, but it’s never been viewed doing so until now. While it’s not exactly a groundbreaking study, it is nice to see an experiment that has been in the care of multiple generations of scientists finally bear fruit — and if that fruit is something that has never been seen by human eyeballs before, well, so much the better!
(via Trinity College, image via YouTube)
- You can still watch the original in slow, slow, slow action here
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