Which Country Holds The Record for 'World's Longest Running Experiment'?

It's been suggested that as many as nine drops have fallen so far with one more expected to drop before the end of this decade.

The Pitch Drop Experiment

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The longest-running existing scientific experiment is the one that is being conducted by the scientists at the University of Queensland, Australia where the “Pitch Drop Experiment” has been in progress for almost a century and could extend for at least 100 more years. The experiment, which was initiated by Thomas Parnell in 1927, attempts to test the flowability of a certain substance called pitch, which is regarded as apart from being used to make roofs coated with tar, the thickest liquid which has a melting point of over 300 degrees because it is in a solid state most of the time.

What Does The Experiment Consist Of?

So then, Parnell took some pitch and melted it and poured it into a glass funnel with tube sealed at the bottom of it. For the next three years, he left the pitch to cool and to settle. In 1930, he cut the stem off the funnel and watched. As noted by the university, “the experiment was envisioned as a classroom illustration” and has therefore not been maintained in any particular way. It is, rather, on view in a showcase where it is subjected to changes in temperature - and consequently, pitch flow stiffness – throughout the year.

When Parnell left the picture, the experiment was taken over by the late Professor John Mainstone in the year 1961 and he managed to keep the experiment running for an incredible 52 years that followed. Ever since the experiment began, the pitch has been known to flow out of the funnel very slowly – so slowly that it took eight years for the first drop, and over fourty years after that for another five drops.

Finding Of The Experiment

It is to be noted that at room temperature, pitch seems to be quite hard, almost as hard as a ceramic material which when struck with a hammer tends to break, but such an experiment illustrated that the material has a viscosity which is approximately one hundred billion times more than that of water. Furthermore, there is still left a considerable amount of pitch inside the funnel which by the famous experiment can last another hundred years.

In 2005, Maidstone and Parnell (posthumously) received the Ig Nobel prize – an award of a somewhat flippant nature that commemorates incredibly minor and inconsequential accomplishments in scientific studies. The intention of the Ig Nobel prize is to indulge in research that makes people laugh and more importantly makes sense in their heads.