The slowest scientific experiment in the world began nearly a century ago with a simple setup: a glass funnel, some black pitch, and a wait that exceeds human lifespan. In 1927, Thomas Parnell, the first physics professor at the University of Queensland in Australia, designed the experiment to demonstrate an unusual property of materials. At room temperature, the pitch appears solid and even brittle, but it is actually a fluid—just an extremely slow one. Parnell wanted to show that some substances, while seeming rigid, can flow over very long periods. His experiment has since become a symbol of patience and the passage of time. Parnell heated a sample of pitch and poured it into a glass funnel with a sealed neck. After letting it cool and stabilize for three years, he cut the neck of the funnel in 1930. From that moment, the pitch began to flow, but so slowly that it took eight years for the first drop to fall. Subsequent drops took even longer—more than forty years for five more to fall. Researchers later calculated the pitch's viscosity, finding it to be about 230 billion times greater than that of water. To put that into perspective, it’s like comparing the flow of spilled water to the slow advance of a glacier over centuries. Over the years, the experiment became a point of curiosity and scientific interest. Parnell himself did not live to see more than two drops fall, as he passed away in 1948. The experiment was later taken care of by physicist John Mainstone, who joined the university in 1961. Mainstone became the experiment's guardian for more than 50 years, ensuring its survival and raising its profile. However, even he missed the fall of several drops due to the experiment's extreme slowness and the occasional lapse in attention. In 2000, the university installed a camera to capture the eighth drop, which had been forming for over a decade. Unfortunately, a power outage occurred at the crucial moment, leaving the event unrecorded. In 2014, the ninth drop finally reached the bottom of the beaker, but only after researchers analyzed footage at an accelerated rate of two million times its normal speed. This event earned Parnell and Mainstone an Ig Nobel Prize in physics, an award that honors research that first makes people laugh and then think. Today, the experiment is on display in the lobby of the Parnell building on the university's St Lucia campus in Brisbane. It continues to draw curious visitors and has a live video stream that attracts thousands of viewers from around the world. The tenth drop is currently forming under the watchful eye of cameras and internet users, with its fall expected in the coming years. For the first time in the experiment's long history, a team of observers is already waiting, ready to witness the next drop with eyes wide open.