The beginning was in 1927 when Thomas Barnell, a professor of physics at Queensland University in Australia, wanted to experiment with the high viscosity and fluidity of bitumen. Since then, the experiment has been going on and scientists expect it to last for more than 100 years.
Bitumen is an oil derivative; a highly viscous black material is exposed at room temperature - about 25 ° C - so solid it can be hammered with a hammer into small pieces on the roads. But the fact is that it is liquid, but its very high wife - estimated at about two hundred and thirty billion times the water wife - makes it look solid and not liquid.
Parnell wanted to explain to his students that the bitumen was fluid and not as solid as it seemed. In 1927 he heated a small quantity of bitumen and then put it in a glass funnel that closed its lower opening until the bitumen cooled. The bitumen cooled for three whole years, and then Barnell restarted the lower hole of repression and allowed the continent to flow through it. Since then, in 1930, only eight drops of tar have fallen.
The first drop of bitumen fell in December 1938, eight years after the experiment began, followed by the second drop in February 1947. Thomas Barnell was not given the chance to record the fall of the third drop in April 1954. He passed away before that. With Barnell's death, the experience was forgotten between the pages of oblivion and dust in one of the cornerstones of the university's physics department. Then found the experiment and then entrusted to Professor "John Manston" presented to the world in 1975. The fourth drop occurred in May 1962, the fifth in August 1970, the sixth in April 1979, the seventh in July 1988, and the eighth and final point until this moment on the 28th of November 2000.
Strangely enough, no one in eighty-five years has ever seen the fall of one drop of eight bitumen droplets of repression! No one can predict when the drop will fall. Although there is a webcam that depicts the experience and is broadcast live on the Internet moment by moment - via the link mms: //drop.physics.uq.edu.au/PitchDropLive - but at the moment of the fall of the last point in twelve years the camera broke down and Watching that moment! Manston expects the ninth point to fall before 2013, but he does not say so.
The experiment is still going on in the second floor of the Parnell Building of the College of Mathematics and Physics at Saint Lucia's University of Queensland campus, which is watched by students and followed by thousands around the world via the Internet. The experience always and always is the only way of science, even if it lasted eighty-five years, the science patient .. And patience without limits