Trinity’s famous pitch-drop experiment, which last dripped in 2013, has fallen again, five years earlier than projected by Trinity’s physicists.
The detached drop of pitch was noted by chance by a physics student, Hugh Conlon, last Friday and was confirmed in a tweet from Trinity’s School of Physics today.
Drops usually occur approximately every decade, but this time, it only took the pitch half that time to drop.
Trinity is one of only three locations in the world with a pitch-drop experiment. The experiment was set up in College in 1944. After sitting unattended on a shelf for years, continuing to shed drops, it was moved to the Berkeley Library in 2013.
The experiment aims to demonstrate the high viscosity of pitch, a material that appears to be solid at room temperature but is, in fact, flowing – albeit extremely slowly.
Five years ago, after the experiment’s move to the Berkeley, Trinity became the first institution worldwide to capture on film a drop of tar pitch falling, an event that received international media coverage.
The University of Queensland’s more famous version of the experiment missed filming its drop in 2000 because its camera was offline at the time.
This time, with a drop not forecast until 2023, the experiment was unmonitored. In a tweet, Trinity’s School of Physics said it was unclear whether or not the speedier drop had been caused by its new location in the Berkeley, “under a special glass cover”.
