Trinity College experiment succeeds after 69 years

http://www.rte.ie/news/2013/0717/463097-trinity-college-dublin-pitch-experiment/

by duggieawesome • 13 years ago

393 115 13 years ago

rte.ie

Peroni2• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_(resin)

xtc• 13 years ago

"Petroleum-derived pitch is black in colour, hence the adjectival phrase, 'pitch-black'."

That was the most interesting thing I found in this experiment.

duggieawesome• 13 years ago

It should be noted that this experiment is different than the Queensland experiment, which is still going on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment

dalore• 13 years ago

How are they different? Both the article and the wikipedia link you gave mention they are similar experiments. It seems they are the same experiment to me.

cecilpl• 13 years ago

They're similar, yes, but they're aren't one and the same.

GP is pointing out that there are two experiments underway.

peterkelly3• 13 years ago

The theory is that the Australian one will drip upside-down

berberous• 13 years ago

Same experiment, but I for one was interested to know it was not the Queensland one, because that one has a great Radiolab episode about all the times they missed the drop (webcams failing, etc.). Their pitch is due to drop soon too, so it's sort of sad someone else beat them to finally filming it.

notacoward• 13 years ago

Same class, different instances. ;)

cupofjoakim• 13 years ago

Dude, I'm finding this hilarious. 69 years to prove that something is a fluid? I picture two really old scientists watching the tape, only to have one of the old geezers turning to the other to spill the sacred words: "Told you so".

digitalsushi• 13 years ago

Science isn't about "told you so". It's about rigor, about completion. It may seem hilarious because of the length of time involved for the experiment to complete, but what if the results hadn't been what we assumed? Science is the only enlightenment we have, and to dismiss the outcome as obvious is to climb back into the dark ages.

elnate• 13 years ago

Then the other one would have said it. Everyone enjoys being proven right.

jgreen102• 13 years ago

Really? Scientists are people. Proving each other wrong is one of the biggest motivators to do years of painstaking, labour-intensive research. Of course, you can't prove someone wrong without being rigorous.

ctdonath• 13 years ago

How long are you willing to run a scientific experiment? People dream of projects that run decades or centuries or even millennia (see the Clock Of The Long Now); few manage to.

sp332• 13 years ago

Well really they could have figured it out as soon as it started moving, which would have been a few months. The first drop fell after a few years and they could have called it quits then, but they wanted a human to observe the pitch drop. That's the only reason it took so long.

peterkelly3• 13 years ago

I bet the grad student involved is celebrating now that they can finally submit their thesis

willis77• 13 years ago

Woah woah woah, not so fast, Doctorate McPhdsosoon. Science is repeatable. See you at lab meeting next Monday morning. Please come prepared with a roadmap for phase 2 trials. These grants don't write themselves, you know.

snowfox• 13 years ago

Phase 2 would be continue to wait to see if the glass funnel would drip in order to prove whether glass is a solid or liquid.

jgreen102• 13 years ago

and all his colleagues will be jealous of him submitting so quickly.

stinkytaco• 13 years ago

Really, it seems like a dream gig. Just being a student for years and years and continuing to get financial aid to continue your thesis work. I've often said if I could be a student for life I'd be happy. I was just picking the wrong field of study. Viscous fluids, here I come.

peterkelly3• 13 years ago

If only it were true.

In Australia, they give you 3 years (plus an additional 1/2 year extension, which isn't always granted). After that, you're on your own, and many people get a full time job to support themselves.

I've seen quite a few people abandon their PhD because of the need to pay the bills once their funding runs out. It's quite sad.

defective2• 13 years ago

I think, after a few missed drops, that I might have added a backup camera.

rmc• 13 years ago

Well it started in the 1940s. There weren't many webcam then, and video cameras (and tape) were expensive.

defective2• 13 years ago

Of course, I understand that. But it lasted so long, through tenured generation after generation. Even though I'm aware it wasn't anyone's master work, it had to be quite frustrating to miss it decade after decade.

morb• 13 years ago

Radiolab had an interesting segment about the Pitch Drop Experiment, interesting to listen: http://www.radiolab.org/2013/feb/05/never-quite-now/

prima-facie• 13 years ago

The title is misleading. The experiment did succeed before, it just hasn't been captured on camera.

robterrell• 13 years ago

Seriously, people did science before there were cameras, right? I think the drop splatted under the funnel is enough evidence to call it done.

jkn• 13 years ago

While I'm fond of this type of down-to-earth experiments, I'm curious about the scientific value of waiting for decades to observe the drop falling due to Earth's gravity, versus placing the apparatus in a centrifuge, which I imagine would dramatically accelerate the process. Maybe the higher forces would affect the way the drop is formed, in a way that was deemed undesirable?

contingencies• 13 years ago

down-to-earth experiments

Bwahahahah!

gk1• 13 years ago

Please keep the discussion constructive. No, there is no pun there.

comrade_ogilvy• 13 years ago

I would argue that confirmation of the shape in 1G has some actual value.

Sometimes "silly" experiments can have value. I chatted with a physic prof once who said the very first experiment he did after gaining tenure was to investigate the isotropy of the universe in particle accelerator experiments -- in other words, do the laws of physic work the same way when the accelerator is pointed one direction, relative to distant stars, as any other.

Obviously, the likely result would be nada.

However, if he found something, it would be two possible things: (1) He was going to earn an instant Noble prize, or (2) There was a potential subtle systematic design error particle physicists had overlooked -- knowing how to look for this error and/or correct for it could have value.

#2 was more likely. But why not?

throwit1979• 13 years ago

Um, not to take away from the achievement of the result, but couldn't this result have been obtained in much less time with higher force than 1G in, say, a centrifuge?

rsynnott• 13 years ago

Well, where's the fun in that?

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

In other news students preferred "watching the pitch" over lectures by a margin of 2 to 1. :-)

omegant• 13 years ago

They learned as the pitch flowed!

rtkwe• 13 years ago

That would be another variable to account for and isn't the a standard test for viscosity. Also with pitch being this viscous having a centrifuge capable of spinning fast enough and long enough would be troublesome.

mathattack• 13 years ago

There couldn't have been an easier way to test this?

juice13• 13 years ago

What's up with one sentance per paragraph? Feels like reading the simple wikipedia.

Peroni2• 13 years ago

I think (hope) it's worth noting the location of this experiment. Trinity College, and the Irish in general, tend to gravitate towards romanticised notions. Even our scientists.

It honestly wouldn't surprise me in the least if the experiment was initiated knowing full well it would take decades to complete but they went ahead anyway 'for the craic'.

mef• 13 years ago

"For the craic", the original "for the lulz" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craic

adjustafresh• 13 years ago

Anyone else reminded of those old Heinz Ketchup ads...Anticipation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoLoyg3JKRQ

adamrneary• 13 years ago

"...the scientific value was questionable..."

finnh• 13 years ago

I call shenanigans. In the time-lapse, the funnel "jumps" upward right when the drop falls (0:56). Unless the funnel's mounted on a spring (?), this is a clear indication that somebody interfered with the drip. I declare this video null and void!

...or maybe the video camera just got jostled when all scientists started dancing around in their glee =)

aarondf2• 13 years ago

More likely than not, the whole setup there is SIXTY NINE years old and a drop of pitch weighs a bit.

Or they got bored and cheated. 50/50 really.

robomartin7• 13 years ago

The first thought that popped into my punny little brain was: Why didn't they use a centrifuge to accelerate results?

The one variable that could be controlled is the gravitational force on the substance. If we were on the moon the experiment, as designed, would take far longer to produce a drop. By using a centrifuge they could have easily simulated significantly greater gravitational forces and arrived at a result much sooner.

EDIT:

The Queensland experiment data says that it takes about 13 years for a drop to form and fall [1]. You'd need less than 5,000 g's to make it happen within a day or about 160 g's to get results in 30 days.

[1] http://www.nature.com/news/world-s-slowest-moving-drop-caugh...

darkchasma• 13 years ago

How long would you have to run the centrifuge for? If it were 6-7 times faster, you would have to run a machine nonstop for 10 years. Seems like a tremendous waste of energy, heat from a motor which could affect the results, and a great likelihood of experimental equipment failure.

robomartin7• 13 years ago

No, you could go a million times faster. A million!

Here's an interesting resource:

http://www.endmemo.com/bio/grpm.php

Now, there might be reasons why a million g's might be a bad idea. Maybe 100K g's is a better choice. Someone with more expertise in centrifuge application could chip in and clarify this.

samatman7• 13 years ago

Chemist here. We use centrifuging to separate components of a suspension by weight.

Pitch is a suspension. The heavy stuff would drop to the outside, the viscosity would be affected, no experiment.

samatman7• 13 years ago

Indeed, it occurs to me that one reason to keep watching the experiment is to see whether heavy pitch migrated to the bottom. If so, the rate should speed up in a few hundred years, assuming the hermetic seal is good and nothing is volatilizing off the top.

This is unlikely, however. Many suspensions have a critical pressure below which they simply will not settle. Homogenized milk, for a familiar example.

robomartin7• 13 years ago

Chemist here. We use centrifuging to separate components of a suspension by weight. Pitch is a suspension.

The last bit is puzzling: Are all suspensions fluids? And all fluids are viscous (even non-newtonian)?

If so, why do we need an experiment to prove that pitch --a suspension-- is a fluid and is viscous?

On the point of using a centrifuge. Is there something particularly special about gravity on earth that does not affect pitch? In other words, if we exposed pitch to 0.1x, 1x, 10x, 100x and 1000x g, at what point would the fundamental characteristics of the material invalidate the experiment. Are fluids and their viscosity only defined on earth (ignoring thermal and other non-gravitational effects)? Perhaps pitch is a viscous fluid on earth but a solid on the moon, where gravity is 1/6 of ours?

Is this experiment only valid at 9.8 m/s^2 then? What's the tolerance based on the substance under test?

timdellinger• 13 years ago

Just letting a suspension sit on the laboratory bench does the same thing: gravity separates the components by density (not weight). That's why you stir paint before you use it: it has partially separated, and has done so without the without the use of a centrifuge.

qwerta• 13 years ago

This is Ireland 1949, they probably did not had money for centrifuge.

scythe• 13 years ago

Centrifuges don't provide a uniform field. The centrifugal pseudopotential is V(r) ~ Ω^2 / r^2; in effect this means that the pitch near the outside of the centrifuge experiences more "gravity". If you want to study pitch in a uniform gravitational field, you'd either need an absurdly large centrifuge -- the size of the Pentagon -- or a solar sail to Jupiter.

edit: also, the Earth's gravity might become a problem.

chm• 13 years ago

"The experiment was begun by a colleague of Nobel Prize winner Ernest Walton in the physics department of Trinity in 1944."

Am I the only one who finds this insulting? They could at least name the guy!!!

yaddayadda• 13 years ago

"Over the years, the identity of the scientist who began the experiment was forgotten, and the experiment lay unattended on a shelf where it continued to shed drops uninterrupted while gathering layers of dust. Physicists at Trinity College recently began to monitor the experiment again. Last April they set up a webcam so that anyone could watch and try to be the first person ever to witness the drop fall live." - http://www.nature.com/news/world-s-slowest-moving-drop-caugh...

randomaccount• 13 years ago

Pretty sure it's this guy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gEz2eE048M His office is in the same room as this tar drop experiment.

user24• 13 years ago

I sort of take issue with "experiment succeeds". You don't (shouldn't) set up an experiment to prove or disprove something, merely to discover.

I'm sure the issue, if indeed there is one, is with the reporting not the scientists though.

jbooth• 13 years ago

Of course you set it up to prove or disprove a hypothesis. Otherwise you're just trying random stuff with no idea why it might be interesting.

pseut• 13 years ago

substitute "ends" for "succeeds" if you're feeling pedantic. I think that for a decades long experiment the two words become synonyms.

davebees• 13 years ago

It's still running!

aplusbi• 13 years ago

"Succeeded" sounds so much better than "rejected the null hypothesis."

Dylan16807• 13 years ago

It succeeded in making a measurement. That was the goal of the experiment, not proving or disproving anything in particular.

hef19898• 13 years ago

Depends on the sample size and the statistical relevance! ;-) DoE anyone?

marco-fiset• 13 years ago

Am I the only one to think that this is pretty boring?

matt1• 13 years ago

For a bit more background on the history of this experiment and why the previous drips were missed, check out this recent Radiolab podcast:

http://joshuafoer.com/radiolab-the-pitch-drop-experiment/

hansjorg• 13 years ago

The Radiolab episode was about a similar experiment at the University of Queensland in Australia.

elmuchoprez• 13 years ago

"Over several decades a number of drips did form in the funnel and fall into the jar, giving credence to the hypothesis that pitch is indeed viscous."

It sounds like the experiment, as designed, reached a conclusion in far less time than 69 years. It just took 69 years for someone to think about video taping it.

RobAley2• 13 years ago

Nope, assuming they designed it for scientific rigour. Without observation, it would be impossible to say, for instance, that some external force (vibration, wind, mischievous students) hadn't caused the drip to form or fall/break off. The experiment didn't reach a firm conclusion (to some level of certainty) without observation.

nagrom• 13 years ago

That's what the parent said: there were previous chances to definitively end the experiment by observing drips, but no-one thought to monitor it with a video camera until recently. There was no need to wait 69 years.

kriro• 13 years ago

What if it's quantum-dripping and only dripped because of the camera :P

stevewilber• 13 years ago

Why does a drop need to fall in order to prove the theory? Isn't seeing the drip forming enough?

tragomaskhalos• 13 years ago

My favourite thing about this story is the various times that this and similar experiments around the world missed capturing the actual drip due to various glitches and snafus; imagine the howl of anguish of the researcher coming in one morning to find that yes something has finally happened after all these years, only to discover that some doofus had left the lens cap on ....

ryen• 13 years ago

Have they analyzed the dripped substance? My first thought is that it could be from condensation formed on the pitch over a large amount of time due to temperature gradients.

carlsednaoui• 13 years ago

Heard about this the Pitch Drop Experiment on Radiolab couple weeks ago. Very interesting episode: http://www.radiolab.org/2013/feb/05/never-quite-now/

"...the Pitch Drop Experiment is so slow, you can watch it for hours (check out the live cam) and not detect the slightest movement. But that doesn't mean nothing's happening. Professor John Mainstone tells us about his desperate attempts to catch the flashes of action hiding inside this decades-long experiment."

aarondf2• 13 years ago

That pitch was a little thick and quite slow. 6/10.

dokem• 13 years ago

why did the pitch have to drip? Isn't the fact that a drip was forming proof that the pitch was flowing?

LeeLorean• 13 years ago

Seems like it to me. Maybe they thought the whole drop quantam tunneled to the bottom

I guess you could have asked that if you find a tree that's fallen in a forrest, did it actually fall over if no one saw it?

kfury• 13 years ago

People have waited through so many failed attempts to record the drop that nobody wants to mention that they didn't 'really' record an unassisted drop. The bead is still connected when it hits bottom, and the tail doesn't break until they raised up the suspended platform.

Check the video and notice that the suspended vessel jumps about 2 inches higher just after the drop.

It's a good recording, but I'm looking forward to a better one in 2026.

ISL• 13 years ago

If you wanted to do this experiment with reasonable statistics, it's quite amenable to parallelization. Pitch is cheap, funnels are cheap, dusty basement shelves are (potentially) cheap, and webcams are inexpensive. Doing ~300 of these in parallel wouldn't be hard, and would allow considerable investigation of systematic effects.

Decade-scale experiments aren't hard, but they do require planning.

shabble• 13 years ago

The Beal seed viability experiment[1] has been running for 120+ years, and iirc they keep increasing the interval between trials because there are only so many seeds stored, and so far they haven't had a significant failure in germinating and growing them.

[1] http://www.amjbot.org/content/89/8/1285.full

thehme• 13 years ago

This is really cool. I only wish we knew the name of the "colleague of Nobel Prize winner Ernest Walton", so he can get credit for this.

donutdan4114• 13 years ago

View this one live: http://smp.uq.edu.au/content/pitch-drop-experiment

codezero• 13 years ago

Science has been confirming results for a long time without the aide of video proof. This sounds like fluff. It's cool fluff, but it's pretty ridiculous to assert that the theory couldn't be proven without video proof.

Trinity College experiment succeeds after 69 years

Related Stories