World's longest-running lab experiment

Pictured above and below, it's The Pitch Drop Experiment, begun in 1927 by Thomas Parnell, a physics professor at the University of Queensland in Australia.

Wrote Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker, "[He] designed an experiment to show his students how viscous a fluid could be. He poured hot pitch into a glass funnel, let it cool, and then waited. Eight years later, the first drop fell."

More: "After another nine years, the second one fell.... There have been a total of eight drops, occurring at an average interval of ten years. The drop takes about a tenth of a second. No one has ever actually seen a drop fall."

And: "John Mainstone [top], the professor who has overseen the experiment since 1961, is eagerly awaiting the ninth drop of pitch, which he expects will occur sometime in 2013. 'Unpredictability is one of the great things about nature,' he said the other day. 'It's the spice of life. Just look at the due dates of babies. We so rarely get even that right.' The pitch drop doesn't accomodate countdowns, he said. 'I've been around long enough that I just see time before and time after. It's only when the drop has happened that what has gone before makes sense in the flow of time. That is, I don't become aware of what was going on just before the drop until after the drop occurs."

That is true enough for the present and past but not for the future: witness the entry of the Pitch Drop webcam, a never-blinking eye on the prize.

The next drop — unlike the revolution — will be televised, though of the many who will view the video footage, very few people indeed, — if any — will actually see the drop fall in real time. 

But you can bet that like the untold thousands of people who claim to have been present at the Polo Grounds but weren't on October 3, 1951, when Bobby Thomson hit the shot heard 'round the world, there will be all manner of folk claiming to have viewed the ninth pitch drop as it happened. 

And who can say they didn't?

But wait, there's more.

Yesterday brought news of the creation of a "hole in time" by physicists at Cornell University. 

Perhaps the next drop will occur during one of those, in which case not only will no one see it fall but also the video record will furnish no proof that it ever happened, beyond the already fallen ninth drop.

[Wikipedia caption for the photo up top: "Picture of the Pitch Drop Experiment from University of Queensland featuring the current (2007) custodian, John Mainstone (picture taken in 1990), two years into the life of the eighth drop.]

The Wikipedia caption is confusing, isn't it?

Maybe this will help:

The eighth drop fell on November 28, 2000, having been poised to descend since July 1988, over 12 years earlier. 

The photo of Mainstone with the eighth drop was taken in 1990; the caption describing it was written in 2007.