Pitch drop experiment

The University of Queensland pitch drop experiment, demonstrating the viscosity of bitumen.

The pitch drop experiment is a long-term experiment that measures the flow of a piece of pitch over many years. Pitch is the name for any of a number of highly viscous liquids that appear solid, most commonly bitumen. At room temperature, tar pitch flows at a very low rate, taking several years to form a single drop.

University of Queensland experiment

The University of Queensland pitch drop experiment, featuring its then-current custodian, Professor John Mainstone (taken in 1990, two years after the seventh drop and 10 years before the eighth drop fell).

The best known version^[1] of the experiment was started in 1927 by Professor Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, to demonstrate to students that some substances that appear to be solid are in fact very-high-viscosity fluids. Parnell poured a heated sample of pitch into a sealed funnel and allowed it to settle for three years. In 1930, the seal at the neck of the funnel was cut, allowing the pitch to start flowing. A glass dome covers the funnel and it is placed on display outside a lecture theatre.^[2] Large droplets form and fall over a period of about a decade.

The eighth drop fell on 28 November 2000, allowing experimenters to calculate that the pitch has a viscosity approximately 230 billion (2.3×10¹¹) times that of water.^[3]

This is recorded in Guinness World Records as the world's longest continuously running laboratory experiment, and it is expected that there is enough pitch in the funnel to allow it to continue for at least another hundred years. This experiment is predated by two other still-active scientific devices, the Oxford Electric Bell (1840) and the Beverly Clock (1864), but each of these has experienced brief interruptions since 1937.

The experiment was not originally carried out under any special controlled atmospheric conditions, meaning that the viscosity could vary throughout the year with fluctuations in temperature. Some time after the seventh drop fell in 1988, air conditioning was added to the location where the experiment takes place. The lower average temperature has lengthened each drop's stretch before it separates from the rest of the pitch in the funnel.

In October 2005, John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in Physics, a parody of the Nobel Prize, for the pitch drop experiment.^[4]

Professor Mainstone subsequently commented:

I am sure that Thomas Parnell would have been flattered to know that Mark Henderson considers him worthy to become a recipient of an Ig Nobel prize. Professor Parnell's award citation would of course have to applaud the new record he had thereby established for the longest lead-time between performance of a seminal scientific experiment and the conferral of such an award, be it a Nobel or an Ig Nobel prize.^[5]

The experiment is monitored by a webcam^[6] but technical problems prevented the November 2000 drop from being recorded.^[7] The pitch drop experiment is on public display on Level 2 of Parnell Building in the School of Mathematics and Physics at the St Lucia campus of the University of Queensland. Hundreds of thousands of Internet users check the live stream each year.^[2]

Professor John Mainstone died on 23 August 2013, aged 78, following a stroke.^[8]

The ninth drop touched the eighth drop on 17 April 2014.^[9][10] However, it was still attached to the funnel. On 24 April 2014, Pitch Drop custodian Andrew White decided to replace the beaker holding the previous eight drops before the ninth drop fused to them. While the bell jar was being lifted, the wooden base wobbled and the ninth drop snapped away from the funnel.^[11]

Timeline

Timeline for the University of Queensland experiment:

^A After the 7th drop, air conditioning was installed, lowering the average temperature.

^B 17 Apr 2014: 9th drop touched 8th drop; 24 Apr 2014: 9th drop separated from funnel during beaker change.

Trinity College Dublin experiment

The pitch drop experiment at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland was started in October 1944 by an unknown colleague of the Nobel prizewinner Ernest Walton while he was in the physics department of Trinity College. This experiment, like the one at Queensland University, was set up to demonstrate the high viscosity of pitch. This physics experiment sat on a shelf in a lecture hall at Trinity College unmonitored for decades as it dripped a number of times from the funnel to the receiving jar below, also gathering layers of dust.^[12][13][14]

In April 2013, about a decade after the previous pitch drop, physicists at Trinity College noticed that another drip was forming. They moved the experiment to a table to monitor and record the falling drip with a webcam, allowing all present to watch. The pitch dripped around 5:00pm on 11 July 2013, marking the first time that a pitch drop was successfully recorded on camera.

Based on the results from this experiment, the Trinity College physicists estimated that the viscosity of the pitch is about two million times that of honey, or about 20 billion times the viscosity of water.^[12]

Experiment at Aberystwyth University in Wales

It is reported that a pitch drop experiment has been recently rediscovered at Aberystwyth University in Wales. Dating from 1914, it predates the Queensland experiment by 13 years. But as the pitch is more viscous (or the average temperature lower) this experiment has not yet produced its first drop.^[1][15]

Demonstrations of Lord Kelvin

In the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow are two pitch-demonstrations by Lord Kelvin from the 19th century. Kelvin placed on top of a dish of pitch some bullets, and corks at the bottom: over time, the bullets sank and the corks floated.

Lord Kelvin also showed that the pitch flows like glaciers, with a mahogany ramp that allowed it to slide slowly downward and form similar shapes and patterns to rivers of ice in the Alps.^[1]

See also

• Rheology
• William James Beal, Botanist who started a long-running seed germination experiment in 1879

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Pitch drop experiment.

• Experiment at University of Queensland (also live webcam)
• Experiment at University of Queensland - picture of the sixth drop shortly after falling (Archive.org)
• Experiment at Trinity College, Dublin (also video of the drop falling)