The Skull in the Stars blog writes about the practice, back when, of cat turning: One thing I’ve learn from studying the history of science is that scientists are human beings. Often incredibly weird, weird human beings. For example: in the mid-to-late-1800s, an exciting era in which the foundations of electromagnetic theory were set and […]
Tag: drop
A new, more rapid, yet unhasty look at pitch slowly dropping
Inspired, eventually, by the long, slow, continuing Australian pitch-drop experiment, a team in London has speeded things up considerably but — deliberately — not at all completely. They published a study about it: “Measurement of bitumen viscosity in a room-temperature drop experiment: student education, public outreach and modern science in one,” A.T. Widdicombe, P. Ravindrarajah, […]
The drop dropped in the Ig Nobel-winning pitch drop experiment
Big little news from Queensland, as reported by Celeste Biever and Lisa Grossman for New Scientist magazine: Longest experiment sees pitch drop after 84-year wait The pitch has dropped – again. This time, the glimpse of a falling blob of tar, also called pitch, represents the first result for the world’s longest-running experiment…. Up-and-running since 1930, the experiment […]
A pitch for the pitch drop experiment
The University of Queensland invites you try to play a tiny but historic part in their Ig Nobel Prize-winning (physics, 2005) experiment: The Pitch Drop is the world’s longest running lab experiment. Many believe it’s also the most boring. But in its 86 years, no one has seen a Pitch Drop fall. Now the 9th […]