Significance of the Pitch Drop Experiment

Almost every blog and newspaper around the world has covered the pitch drop experiment by now, however few have mentioned what this experiment succeeds in helping scientists discover. The experiment set in 1944 at the Trinity College Dublin is the second of its kind. It was meant to help researchers calculate the viscosity of pitch, which according to this experiment is calculated to be 2×107 Pa s. This over-hyped experiment however is just reproducing results obtained by itself and the one setup in 1927 at the University of Queensland. Overtime these pitch drop experiment have yielded just one scientific paper, wherein the pitch’s viscosity is approximated at around 230 billion times that of water. What’s exceptional this time around is that for the first time the falling drop was captured live on video, since all previous drops have never been witnessed falling.