Who here has heard about the Pitch Drop experiment?

This guy

Professor Thomas Parnell hypothesized way back in the 1920's that pitch was actually a highly viscous fluid. He put some pitch in a funnel and it takes more then a decade for a single drop to fall.

This post was edited by xXAn0nym0usXx on Jun 5 2012 07:35am

I don't know about the pitch experiment, but I would say the Tuskegee Experiment

It is the pitch experiment. It's been going on for 80-90 years and some drops every 5-12 years depending. A drop has never been seen.

It's similar to glass, which is actually a fluid, and slowly overtime will sink down.

Glass is very much a solid... don't believe everything you hear.

Glass is a solid.

It retains properties that can cause the molecular structure to become amorphous if it undergoes rapid cooling.

Hence, high quality glassware is cooled very slowly to facilitate a crystalline molecular structure.

The thoughts following antique glass being thicker at the bottom is directly related to the methods that were available at the time for producing glass panes. In other words, they lacked the technology we have today to keep a pane of glass at a constant thickness during production.

^
Was too lazy to get into it all, thanks

Five sentences?

No wonder you thought glass was a liquid

Yea, they say the experiment slowed down by a huge factor since the last 00's because they installed air conditioning in the building. *facepalm*

I have here a live stream feed to the experiment where the 9th drop is imminent. However since it is Winter and the last drop is caught it has been 12 years since the 8th drop. The 9th drop is going to happen anytime between now and the next 12 months.

Anyway here is the live stream to the longest running experiment. http://smp.uq.edu.au/content/pitch-drop-experiment