The solid in the funnel is a liquid, and it drips

Pitch poured into a funnel in 1927 has been dripping since the stem was cut in 1930. A drop takes the better part of a decade. The experiment is still running.

Thomas Parnell, the first professor of physics at the University of Queensland, heated a sample of pitch, poured it into a sealed funnel, and waited three years for it to settle. In October 1930 the stem was cut. The first drop fell in 1938. Later drops have fallen on a cadence of several years to about a decade. The viscosity is enormous, hundreds of billions of times that of water, and the demonstration is that ‘solid’ judged by eye is not a phase. Pitch is an amorphous liquid. Given a slope and a decade, it finds the bottom.

For most of the experiment’s life, the fall itself was missed. A drop that takes ten years does not advertise the afternoon it lets go, and the custodian was not always in the room. Cameras have since caught one. The point survived the misses. The funnel is the longest-running laboratory experiment still going, and the next drop is simply late, not theoretical.