Monthly Archives: October 2014

The World’s Longest Running Laboratory Experiment

Pitch Drop ExperimentIt’s amazing what can happen, given enough time. For instance, could something solid act like a liquid, if left long enough?

In today’s blog post we look at the World’s Longest-Running Laboratory Experiment and find out how time (and gravity) has dropped this 87 year long (and counting) experiment into the Guinness world record books.

In 1927, Thomas Parnell from the University of Queensland, Australia created an experiment to demonstrate the fluidity of seemingly solid materials.

Parnell wanted to show that ‘pitch’, a tough and solid, tar like substance that was traditionally used to help caulk the seams of wooden sailing boats, could actually behave in a similar manner to an extremely slow moving liquid.

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