Countdown process for the 10th drop in the Pitch Drop Experiment

The countdown has begun for the fall of the 10th drop in the Pitch Drop Experiment, which has been ongoing for nearly a century in the laboratories of the University of Queensland in Australia and is listed in the Guinness World Records.

The Pitch Drop Experiment, conducted at the University of Queensland in Australia, entered the Guinness World Records as the world's longest-running continuous laboratory experiment. The experiment was laid down in 1927 by Thomas Parnell, the university's first physics professor, to demonstrate that pitch resin is a fluid liquid, and the bottom of the funnel was cut in 1930. Having a viscosity 230 billion times denser than water, the resin has produced only 9 drops to date under the influence of gravity, and none of these drops could be seen with the naked eye.

Various misfortunes occurred during past falls; while the first 7 drops fell between 1938 and 1988, John Mainstone, the custodian who dedicated more than half a century of his life to the experiment, missed the 7th drop in 1988 during a 5-minute break to get coffee. A power outage occurred during the 8th drop in 2000, and the 9th drop in 2014 detached mechanically as a result of an intervention. In the experiment, which was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in Physics in 2005, experts calculate based on past 12-to-13-year periods that the fall window for the 10th drop is expected between mid-2026 and autumn 2027.