Slowest-moving drop in the world captured on video for the first time

There's excitement in the science community today: after 69 years, the pitch has dropped, and scientists caught it all on video.

What I'm referring to is the tar pitch experiment at Trinity College Dublin. This experiment has been running since 1944, to demonstrate how tar pitch, also known as asphalt, may seem to be a solid at room temperature (around 20°C), but it's actually a fluid that flows really, really slowly.

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This experiment was first set up by melting tar pitch, pouring it into a funnel, capping it until it completely cooled, and then removing the cap to let the pitch flow from the bottom of the funnel. Apparently, it takes roughly 10 years or so for a drop to fall.

The experiment was actually forgotten on a shelf in the school's physics department for some time, but it was dusted off and broadcast on the web by professors at the school starting in May, as they saw another drop was about to fall. The drop finally separated from the flow on July 11th, around 5 p.m., and was captured in this video (check out how fast the hands of the clock on the right are spinning):

"We were all so excited," Prof. Shane Bergin, the physics professor who broadcast the experiment, told Nature. "It’s been such a great talking point, with colleagues eager to investigate the mechanics of the break, and the viscosity of the pitch."

According to Nature, the experiment showed that the tar pitch has a viscosity roughly 2 million times that of honey, or 20 billion times that of water.

The first experiment of this kind was actually started in 1927, at the University of Queensland, in Brisbane, Australia. It's in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest-running laboratory experiment in the world, and it has the same 'drop rate' as the Trinity experiment, but the last time it happened (in 2000), the camera watching it was unfortunately turned off. That experiment is expected to make another drop sometime this year.

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There may seem to be a lot more interesting experiments going on in the world, with things like smashing atoms together in giant colliders or detecting elusive neutrinos or dark matter, but this one simply demonstrates what's at the core of every bit of science we do, and all science that we'll ever do.

As Prof. Bergin said in a Trinity College press release: "People love this experiment because it gets to the heart of what good science is all about — curiosity."

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