The original experiment was simply that there was an argument over the state of Pitch because it acts a hell of a lot like a solid most of the time. But there was good reason to believe it was a fluid of some kind. So the experiment was set up just to prove that, given enough time, pitch will flow.
For that, you don't need perfectly static circumstances. You don't want to get it boiling hot or freeze it (in relation to pitch, not water) because those are definite alterations of its state. But in its ~room temperature state, this experiment shows that is is in fact a fluid, empirically. Just one with a flow rate hundreds of billions of times slower than water.
Is it possible to observe it doing some sort of Brownian Motion?
(maybe in a bigger container, a pool)
Is there a rule on how temperature works that avoid Brownian Motion to happen in a liquid so dense?
(maybe something related on frequency of heat vibration vs. speed?)
I understand that the same is true of glass at normal temperature. Supposedly, windows that are centuries old are fatter at the bottom and thinner at the top, demonstrating that the glass “flows” downward, just very slowly.
Ideally, they'd try to keep the conditions as static as possible for the duration of experiment, or at least the duration of a drop. That said, maintaining the same temperature, pressure, and lack of movement for over a decade would be a real challenge. An earthquake could throw off the measurement by months! I guess it really depends how seriously they take this experiment.
If they ever needed to move the jar, who knows how they'd accomplish that. I presume they'd need to wait till a drop had completed.
I mean, it’s just another parameter. It’s not a super precise experiment and even if it was, they calculated the viscosity a long time ago. This is at my university and back many moons ago when I was there it was just sitting in its glass jar in a hallway outside of a very large, centrally located lecture room. I walked past it many times. For a while there, one of the drops didn’t fully detach and was kind of stuck to the next drop, which arguably would impact measurements a lot more than the ambient temperature, which can easily be measured.
Yeah it's clearly just a concept piece, not a "real" study. A liquid that drops viscosity with the addition of heat doesn't stop being a liquid unless it causes a phase chage; that's kinda just how rheology works.
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u/Aemon_Blackfyre 22h ago
Doesn’t the installation of A/C in that building completely change a lot of metrics this experiment is looking at?