Tim Melkus 🇺🇸 🚀

Did you know? There's an experiment that has been continuously running since 1927. In this time, only 9 drops have fallen. The most famous pitch drop experiment was set up by physicist Thomas Parnell at the University of Queensland in 1927. During 88 years, the funnel has only dripped nine times. It currently holds the Guinness World Record for longest continually running laboratory experiment and was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in 2005. If you can smash a substance to pieces with a hammer, then it must be a solid. Right? Surprisingly, this isn’t always the case. Although currently used for tarmacking and being smashed by hammers, the debate over pitch’s molecular structure has a long history. As early as the 1880s, physicist Lord Kelvin was creating experiments at the University of Glasgow to show that pitch flowed like a liquid – albeit at very slow speeds. This is why the experiment was started.