I’m out of town for the weekend, and though I am not around to update this site it’s smart enough to update itself. Well, anyway it’s smart enough to schedule this post for Saturday morning when I’m actually typing this on Thursday night. I won’t exactly be in an internet-free wilderness, but I’ll probably be too busy to get online. It’s my significant-other’s sister’s wedding in Atlanta! Fun times will be had by all, I’m sure. I’m not exactly a wedding connoisseur, but I am a wedding reception connoisseur. Free food and free cake are something I don’t usually turn down.
So while the site auto-posts in zombie mode as it waits for me to get back, here’s a physics experiment at the University of Queensland which has been people have been waiting on for a long time. It’s the longest running of any physics experiment. It goes like this: different liquids have different thicknesses. Viscosity, we call it. Water isn’t very viscous; maple syrup is much more so. Pitch is much more so. It’s so thick it seems solid at room temperature - but it isn’t quite. In 1930 some scientists put some pitch in a funnel and let it start dripping. In the last 70 years, it’s dripped a total of 8 times. The most recent of which happened in the year 2000. At the current pace, we’re not too many years away from the next drop falling.
Have a great weekend!
1 response so far ↓
1 Eric Juve // Aug 1, 2008 at 12:57 pm
I did this experiment back in the 80’s. I used a lab funnel, with the stem cut off, and some rosin for a violin. It took about a year for the pitch to conform to the shape of the funnel and another year for the first drip to start to form on the funnel tip. Fun to watch, sort of like watching grass grow, just not as fast.
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