In an essay called “Patience Amid Long Experiments“, in the Adventist Review, Justin Kim says “The pitch-drop experiment teaches our faith community some lessons.” Kim goes on to explain: “A parody of the world-famous Nobel Prize, the Ig Nobel Prize was established in 1991 to recognize achievements that first ‘make people laugh, then think.’ In […]
Tag: experiment
A Look at the Looooooooong-Almost-Dripping, Ig Nobel Prize-winning Pitch Drop Experiment
The folks at Today I Found Out take a look at the Ig Nobel Prize-winning Pitch Drop Experiment: The 2005 Ig Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland, Australia, for patiently conducting an experiment that began in the year 1927 — in which a glob of congealed black tar […]
Adventures in Mailing
Alyssa Pelish writes about the difficult cases handled by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). Pelish’s essay, called “The Bureau of Hards“, appears in the Fence blog. Close attention is paid there to a modest experiment: Indeed, an experiment run in 2000 by a group affiliated with the eccentrics behind the annual Ig Nobel Prize found that […]
A research project for the ages and ages
Andrew Stafford took a look at the current state of the Ig Nobel Prize-winning pitch drop experiment. His report, in The Guardian, bears the headline ” ‘It’s literally slower than watching Australia drift north’: the laboratory experiment that will outlive us all“. The 2005 Ig Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to John Mainstone and […]


