A lecture about an experiment

A lecture about an experiment

Listen to the lecture about a science experiment to practise and improve your listening skills.

Do the preparation task first. Then listen to the audio and do the exercises.

Transcript

In today's lecture we're going to be talking about experiments, and I thought it might be interesting for you all to learn about the world's oldest continuously running laboratory experiment that is still going today. In fact, it holds the Guinness World Record for being the longest-running experiment. This experiment began in 1927 and has been going ever since.

It's called the 'pitch drop' experiment and it was created by Professor Thomas Parnell at the University of Queensland, Australia. Parnell was the university's first physics professor, and he wanted to show in this experiment that everyday materials, such as pitch, can have quite surprising properties.

You see, when pitch is at room temperature, it feels solid. You can easily break it with a hammer. However, it isn't in fact solid. At room temperature, pitch is many billions of times more viscous than water, but it's actually fluid.

In 1927, Professor Parnell took a sample of pitch. He heated it and poured it into a glass funnel. He allowed the pitch to cool and settle – for three years. He then turned the funnel upside down and cut the top off it.

Since then, the pitch has slowly dropped out of the funnel. How slowly? Well, the first drop took eight years to fall. It took another forty years for another five drops to fall. Today it's been almost 90 years since the experiment started. Only nine drops have fallen from the funnel. The last drop fell in April 2014 and the next one is expected to fall in the 2020s.

The experiment has a tragic story associated with it. Professor Parnell died without seeing a pitch drop. His replacement, Professor John Mainstone, became responsible for the pitch drop experiment from 1961. He held the job for 52 years, and missed seeing the drop fall three times – by a day in 1977, by just five minutes in 1988 and finally in 2000, when the webcam that was recording the experiment suffered a power outage for 20 minutes, during which time the pitch dropped.

The pitch drop experiment is something we can all participate in now. There's a live web stream that allows anyone to watch the glass funnel and wait for the fateful moment. A similar experiment to the Queensland pitch drop was set up in Dublin, and the video of the moment the pitch actually dropped went viral on the internet. It's interesting to see how a very slow event can spread news so quickly.

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Submitted by David Horacio on Wed, 10/06/2020 - 03:05

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I've got a question. The thing is that the instructions of the second task are asking for an answer with one or three words, nevertheless one of the answers is a word and a NUMBER. Shouldn't it be a good idea to say "Complete the sentences with one to three words or/and numbers?

Hello David Horacio

Thanks for the suggestion. I've changed the instructions.

Best wishes

Kirk

The LearnEnglish Team

Submitted by Wen_Koala on Fri, 29/05/2020 - 00:38

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I don't know any sophisticated experiment like the 'Pitch drop'

Submitted by Ahmadbassam on Fri, 15/05/2020 - 17:16

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Yes, i know. The most well-known experment at biology is Mendel's experiment on peas plants in1800s.
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Submitted by OlaIELTS on Thu, 07/05/2020 - 01:40

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Yes. They includes colour mixtures, mixtures of solution, solar, sunlight in plant growth and so on.
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Submitted by vanenglish on Wed, 06/05/2020 - 00:58

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Yes, I gues the most famous experiment I know is The Laika's launch, when Sovietics sent a dog into a space mission becuse they wanted to test if the space travels are safety for humans. The dog would never come back, it was a suicide mission and it is really shocking to me.

Submitted by yoyoraw on Thu, 23/04/2020 - 11:19

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Will Iam not familiar with the experiments that are happening ,but i look forward to read more about them .

Submitted by shahhoseini on Sun, 22/03/2020 - 14:44

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I think one of the famous experiments in the world is the CERN accelerator.

Submitted by armando on Wed, 29/01/2020 - 07:33

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Hello everyone!! well I'd hear about experiments with atomic particles moving in circles at incredible speed, what they are trying to do is create new energy frome that particle movement.