Isn’t science wonderful?

There was a time when I would never have caught myself saying it, but here goes: isn’t science wonderful. That is, isn’t science wonderful when it shows a human face. What caught my attention recently was an article in the Toronto Star about the “pitch drop experiment” at the University of Queensland, in Australia. The experiment is billed as the world’s longest running science project. Set up in 1927, it seeks to measure the flowing capacity of pitch, a tarry substance that is solid at room temperatures. But even pitch can flow like a viscous liquid.

To demonstrate this, an experiment was designed to put pitch in a glass jar with an elongated tube underneath. The theory was that drops from the pitch would eventually find their way to the bottom.

So the question is: at what rate does it flow? And the answer is: very, very slowly. In fact, the pitch has only “dropped” eight times so far, which makes the average about once every 11 years. The pitch dropped fairly regularly every eight or nine years at the outset, but perhaps because there is less downward pressure as the pitch loses mass, and the introduction of air conditioning, it is dropping less frequently. They’ve been waiting 14 years for drop number nine.

However, the previous three drops have all met some sort of calamity, which has triggered intense interest in the forthcoming drop (which could happen “soon,” or “maybe in the next six months” or “maybe next year,” according to the project custodian, who is the third scientist to take charge of the experiment.) For drop number six, in 1979, the scientist stayed Friday night, all day Saturday and then Saturday night. Sure enough, he went home exhausted Sunday morning, and came back on Monday morning to discover he had missed the spectacular drop. Then, in 1988, when the experiment had been moved to a world exposition site so it could be seen by passersby, the scientist nipped out for a cup of tea and no one saw drop number seven. Again, in 2000, video cameras were trained on the pitch to capture drop number eight, but there was a 20- minute power outage due to a thunderstorm, and sure enough, the pitch dropped during the outage.

Of course, nothing is going to go wrong during drop number nine, whenever that may be. Three webcams with independent power sources are focussed on the pitch, 24/7. At least 18,000 people are registered with the website to be able to view every dramatic moment. Somehow, however, I’m rooting for the publicity-shy pitch to drop for the ninth time out of public view again.

All in all, the experiment has been delightfully snakebit—so delightfully that it was awarded the 2005 “IgNobel Prize” in physics. What is an IgNobel prize? I confess that I had never heard of it until I read the Toronto Star article, but there is a magazine called the Annals of Improbable Research, which reports on scientific work of dubious or trivial value, that has been awarding these prizes since 1991, in ceremonies at Harvard University with real Nobel Prize winners as presenters. And there is quite a cornucopia of research of dubious value to pick from.

How about the 1995 prize for physics, which was awarded to three researchers from Norwich, England for their study of soggy breakfast cereal, entitled: A study of the Effects of Water Content on the Compaction Behaviour of Breakfast Cereal Flakes. In the same year, researchers from Denmark and Norway shared the prize in public health for their study on the Impact of Wet Underwear on Thermoregulatory Responses and Thermal Comfort in the Cold.

How can one not have stood to applaud the 1998 researchers (including one from Muzak Ltd) who decided that elevator music may help prevent the common cold, thereby winning the medicine prize? Or the brave 2004 researchers who also won the prize in medicine for examining the effect of country music on suicide? Or the 2013 Japanese researchers who studied the effect of opera on mice who had received heart transplants?

Canadian researchers come off well. Just a smallish sample: in 2000, a researcher from Dalhousie University won the biology prize for studying The Comparative Palatability of Some Dry-Season Tadpoles from Costa Rica. The next year, a McGill researcher was honoured with the prize in medicine for his report on Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts. In 2003, a University of Ottawa researcher shared the prize in physics for studying the dynamics of hula-hooping. In 2012, a Canadian shared the fluid dynamics prize for a paper entitled Walking with coffee: why does it spill?

And who among us has not wondered about the forces required to drag sheep over various surfaces (physics prize, 2003)? Or whether people can swim faster in syrup than water (chemistry prize, 2005)? Or whether woodpeckers get headaches (ornithology prize, 2006)? Or why spaghetti tends to break into more than two pieces when it is bent (physics, 2006).

No, I’m not making this stuff up: the web links to the journals in question are all there at www.improbable.com. So, if you want to know whether cows who have names give more milk than nameless cows (veterinary medicine, 2009), whether knuckle-cracking leads to arthritis of the fingers (medicine, 2009), or whether there is evidence of contagious yawning in the red-footed tortoise (physiology, 2011) you can, as they say, click on the links.

Isn’t science wonderful?

dsimmonds@wellingtontimes.ca