The Best Australian Science Writing 2014

by Ashley Hay

‘But the window of opportunity for that is not going to be there forever,’ he says. ‘We need to get that alignment of the mining opportunities with the technical expertise, from graphite to graphene to graphene-based devices, as quickly as possible. We won’t be the only people thinking of doing that – but we have to be nimble enough to be the first.’

  The CAVE artists

  Here be dragons

  Pitch fever

  Trent Dalton

  He was born before the first pitch drop, at 13 minutes past four on the morning of 12 January 1935. He knows precisely what time he was born because time is precious to him. Three seconds to wipe his nose with his hanky and place it back in his right pocket. Six seconds for his black leather shoes to shuffle across a tiled floor from the entry of the University of Queensland’s physics building to a bench seat outside lecture theatre 222, which accommodates almost 200 science students engrossed in a unit called ‘Earth 1000’. One second to brush his snow-white hair across his scalp, from left to right. Half a second to clear his throat. Two hours and 13 minutes to tell the story of the world’s longest running laboratory science experiment, the Pitch Drop Experiment.

  Professor John Mainstone, retired head of the UQ physics school, leans towards a glass display cabinet outside the lecture theatre. Inside it, on a shelf, sits a glass dome encasing a funnel of hard, black, tar pitch, a substance so dense and brittle that it would shatter under a swift hammer blow. Yet this pitch – solid to the naked eye – has been moving heartbreakingly slowly through the funnel over the course of 86 years, producing only eight monumental drops that have fallen at increasing intervals: seven years, eight years, nine years, 12 years. The last drop fell on 28 November 2000. And the kicker – the scientific anomaly the experiment’s creator, the late UQ physics head Thomas Parnell, never could have predicted – is that nobody has ever seen a drop fall.

  Mainstone’s eyes fix on a globule of pitch with a stem stretching 4 centimetres from the bottom of the funnel, at once falling and solid. This is the ninth drop. It hangs like a tonsil, like a fig, like a bell refusing to toll. Suspended in time. Pregnant. Perfectly pendent. Mainstone inspects this drop five times a day. He is the custodian. He has dedicated 52 of his 78 years on Earth to waiting for a single, majestic splashdown – an event he estimates will unfold in the space of one-tenth of a second.

  Twice he has come agonisingly close, on drops seven and eight in 1988 and 2000, but physics conspired with calamity and the gods of science laughed in his puzzled face. Now he watches the ninth drop like a sentinel, protects it, cherishes it, stares at it through the cabinet glass the way new mums stare through nursery windows. And the world stares with him. Fixed beside the glass dome is a Logitech video camera with a Carl Zeiss lens streaming live footage of the pending ninth drop to internet audiences across the globe.

  Between 17 February 2012 and 17 February 2013 the University of Queensland’s School of Mathematics and Physics pitch drop live streaming page welcomed 361 876 unique viewers. ‘The pitch drop junkies,’ Mainstone says. More than a quarter of a million people around the planet tuning in, all desperate to be the first to see a drop fall. Some stare for minutes, some for hours, faces still, mouths agape, lost in time and space, consumed by the hypnotic anticipation of the drop. The still and stubborn drop questions their notions of time, challenges the way they lead their lives, dares them to attend to more pressing matters in the 24 hours they’ve been allotted by the universe each passing day.

  Each morning Mainstone opens his emails to respond to questions and theories sent to him by South American pitch drop enthusiasts, Inuits with predictions on the ninth drop’s time of splashdown, Dutchmen giving suggestions on camera angles. He’s been interviewed by journalists from The New Yorker, featured in Russian news spots and the Polish edition of National Geographic. On 14 February 2013, Mainstone gave an interview on America’s National Public Radio network announcing his belief that the ninth pitch drop could fall this year, and, indeed, any second now. Giddy with excitement, some 14 958 global viewers – 10 372 Americans alone – promptly clicked onto the pitch drop page, a wave of interest so big it temporarily crashed the UQ School of Mathematics and Physics website.

  In the foyer of lecture theatre 222, Mainstone laughs, stroking his chin thoughtfully, as he often does, looking at a black-and-white photo in the display cabinet of his predecessor Parnell, pinned next to the world’s longest running lab experiment’s Guinness World Records certificate. Beside the funnel of pitch is a square clock, showing Eastern Standard Time, its little hand making its eternal journey around the clock face.

  ‘The clock ticks away,’ Mainstone says. ‘But, almost stubbornly, the pitch drop sits there and says, “Look, is it important to measure the seconds?” Well, yes, it determines the things we need to do and things we need to plan. That’s the time we have to use to indicate what we are doing here, how long we have in this world, how much time we dedicate to working on something before we move on to something else.’

  He shifts his gaze back to the ninth drop. ‘But this … ’ he says. ‘We are looking at something which takes us far beyond the way in which time is just ticking away. It moves at its own pace. We have this idea that we ought to be able to control everything. But this is not a controlled experiment. We try to make things that obey our design rules and everything else. This is not in that category at all. This is something very, very different.’

  He looks deep into the pending ninth drop. He sees something more than physics. He sees a creation whose complex properties have been allowed to change over time. He sees a time span of 86 years. He sees something brutally unpredictable. He sees his own life. And he sees Sir Douglas Mawson on a mountain top in South Australia’s Fleurieu Peninsula watching clouds form over an endless Southern Ocean.

  * * * * *

  Professor Thomas Parnell was 46 years old when he created the Pitch Drop Experiment in 1927 for his physics undergraduates to explore the complexities of tar pitch, a substance often used to seal the hulls of sea vessels. He wanted to prove that while pitch appears to be a breakable solid at room temperature, it is actually high-viscosity liquid. He heated a sample of pitch and poured it into a sealed funnel. For three years he waited for that pitch to settle; then he unsealed the funnel, letting the sluggish tar which is 100 billion times more viscous than water begin its interminable odyssey down the spout.

  In the foyer of theatre 222, students pour out of the Earth 1000 lecture. Mainstone navigates through the crowd and finds shelter in the building’s science museum, a quiet room bordered by shelves holding collections of quaint and bizarre brass testing instruments – sonometers, potentiometers, acoustic resonators, millivoltmeters, galvanometers – each of which awe the ageing professor in their own special way.

  Mainstone was three years old when the first pitch drop fell unseen in 1938, the year Orson Welles broadcast The War of the Worlds, the year General Motors began mass-producing diesel engines and Hitler was named Time’s Man of the Year. Parnell had long since retired and the Pitch Drop Experiment was seen more as a whimsical curio by its academic caretakers than as a touchstone of science. Its drops would be dutifully noted in coming decades but hardly heralded with popping champagne corks.

  In 1938, Mainstone was living in Kiama on the NSW south coast where his father, Sidney, was a priest in the town’s Anglican church. At nine, his father took him to a lecture by Australian radio pioneer and co-founder of the AWA communications company, Sir Ernest Fisk. The boy sat spellbound as Fisk spoke of astronomy and the universe. ‘I promptly went off and read about Newton, Galileo, Copernicus and the rest,’ says Mainstone. ‘That was the beginning of me leaning towards trying to find out about what lies behind the things we can observe.’

  The second drop fell unseen in February 1947, 18 months before Professor Parnell died of hypertensive cardiorenal failure, leaving behind his wife Hermiene and their only son, Thomas.

  It was in January 1951, the year JD Salinger published T
he Catcher in the Rye and the first Chiko Roll was sold at an agricultural show in Wagga Wagga, that Mainstone began his science degree at the University of Adelaide, studying physics, chemistry, pure mathematics and geology. This was when Mainstone experienced what he describes as the most significant moment of his academic life, the day an old man with a familiar face ambled into his first geology lecture and introduced himself as Sir Douglas Mawson, the great Antarctic explorer.

  ‘He would take us on little expeditions,’ Mainstone says. ‘He would be walking along almost by himself. All the other students would walk along with the younger members of the teaching staff. I thought, “These people have got no soul. Here’s this man, this legend.” I made it my role that I would spend all my time on these expeditions with him as much as possible, walking through the South Australian wilderness.’

  Mawson took a liking to the quietly spoken boy from Kiama. He prised open the universe for Mainstone, unveiled its wonders: the mind-bending physics behind crystalline structures he’d found in the Antarctic, the majesty of ancient fossils, the impossibly slow movement of a glacier. ‘It just continued on and I realised that here I was in the presence of one of the most extraordinary people that ever walked this Earth,’ Mainstone says, shaking his head at the memory. ‘And he must have felt something there at the same time because he insisted that when we went on these expeditions that I always sit with him in the front of his old Hudson Terraplane car in which he used to carry his supplies.’

  On one expedition through the Fleurieu Peninsula, south of Adelaide, Mainstone found himself part of a group of four or five science students standing beside Mawson, then aged 69, as he stared out to the Southern Ocean. He saw a far-off formation of clouds so full and low they resembled a shimmering white land mass. ‘You see that over there,’ Mawson said, extending his forefinger to the sea. ‘That’s exactly as I remember my first view with Shackleton of the Antarctic continent.’

  It was Mawson who told Mainstone to become a physicist and dedicate his life to discovering what lies behind the things we can observe. It was Mawson who taught him about approaching scientific problems in settings that can’t be controlled; that the universe, like one’s life, is a collection of events mercifully out of our control. It was Mawson who taught him about patience, about waiting long enough to let illumination present itself.

  Mawson died from a cerebral haemorrhage at his home in Brighton, South Australia, between the third and fourth pitch drops, on 14 October 1958, the same year Parnell’s only son, Thomas, became a father – to a boy named Thomas.

  In the summer of 1960, two years before the fourth drop fell, Mainstone met the love of his life, Claire, by chance in a corridor on the passenger liner Iberia, sailing from Vancouver to Brisbane. On 17 January 1961, the day outgoing US president Dwight D Eisenhower gave his televised farewell speech, Mainstone walked into the UQ physics building for the first time to start work as a lecturer.

  That day, a colleague asked if he would like to see a curious experiment that had long been relegated to a corner in a cupboard in the physics laboratory near lecture theatre 222. ‘There it was,’ Mainstone says. ‘Thomas Parnell’s Pitch Drop Experiment. There was something about it that really sort of got at me. This experiment was historic. I’d never seen anything like it. Never heard of anything like it. Never read anything about this thing.’

  That night, Mainstone had dinner with the head of physics, Hugh Webster. ‘I think we should have Parnell’s Pitch Drop Experiment on display for the general public,’ he said to his boss.

  ‘No way,’ scoffed Webster. ‘Nobody would be the slightest bit interested.’ Mainstone didn’t argue with Webster that night. He didn’t make a fuss. He simply waited.

  The fifth drop fell in August 1970, the year the Beatles broke up and Germaine Greer published The Female Eunuch. In the eight years between drops four and five, Mainstone had fathered three girls, Kathryn (Valentine’s Day 1964), Julia (9 January 1968) and Penelope (5 November 1969).

  * * * * *

  In 1972, there was a new head of physics at UQ who was agreeable to Mainstone’s bid to have the Pitch Drop Experiment displayed in the building’s foyer for all to see. By this time the sixth drop had begun to form – a drop that would outlast the downfall of Nixon, the scrapping of the White Australia policy, the end of the Vietnam War. Mainstone monitored the experiment twice daily.

  The sixth drop fell in April 1979, the month before Margaret Thatcher became the first female prime minister of Britain. It fell on a weekend. Mainstone – by now the experiment’s unofficial custodian – had dropped into the lab on the Saturday to check on the drop, which was showing signs of an imminent fall.

  ‘I’ve seen quite a number of these drops in their final stages,’ he says. ‘Just before they come away, typically, you’ll have three or four fibres like that … ’ He holds his right hand up, pointing his fingers down so they look like stalactites clinging to a cave ceiling. ‘These fibres are holding the pending drop. Now, what happens in the final stages, right in that precious tenth of a second or so when the thing drops down, is this system of little fibres that are somehow holding up there must indeed be somewhat prone to a disturbance. It’s an unstable situation.’

  He grips one of his fingers. ‘If it’s being held there nicely in equilibrium this one might, for some reason, decide it’s going to break,’ he says. ‘When that happens the whole thing, I think, must be quite catastrophic.’

  The stem of the drop is stretched to breaking point. But such are the pitch’s properties that the pending drop can remain at breaking point for days. On that Saturday afternoon in 1979, Mainstone contemplated staying at work to study the drop, but chose to return home to help Claire around the house. Even the most understanding of busy wives would question a man spending a night in a laboratory staring at a drop of pitch. ‘It’s unlikely that anything will happen before the end of the weekend,’ he told himself as he locked the laboratory door. He returned first thing Monday morning to find the sixth drop had made a glorious and unseen plunge 5 centimetres into a waiting glass beaker.

  Nine years later, in July 1988, the Pitch Drop Experiment was on show at Brisbane’s World Expo when Mainstone noticed, yet again, the four or five hanging fibres signalling an imminent fall. He watched it day and night, noting the slightest alteration in the drop’s structure.

  He decided to reward his tireless, unblinking vigil with what he recalls was a thirst-quenching can of soft drink. He figures it took roughly five minutes to walk to a nearby food stall to buy the soft drink and return. Five minutes. Three hundred seconds. Less time than it takes to listen to Guns’n’Roses’ 1988 hit ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’. Five minutes. The average time it takes to unload a dishwasher, set the table, vacuum a bedroom. Mainstone returned five minutes later to discover the seventh pitch drop had escaped from the funnel.

  By November 2000, Mainstone was in the first phase of university retirement. He was travelling through England with Claire, visiting a much-loved former place of study, the University of Cambridge, when he received an email from a UQ colleague concerned the eighth drop was going to fall. ‘It looks as though something might be about to happen,’ the colleague wrote.

  Bruised from 1988’s unseen fall, Mainstone and his team had wisely set up a 24-hour video camera next to the experiment to record the moment of separation. ‘We’ll have it all covered,’ Mainstone replied. ‘The drop will be recorded and I’ll see it when we get back.’

  Another email landed in the professor’s inbox. ‘It has dropped!’ his colleague wrote. ‘But it hasn’t dropped very cleanly because it was a very big drop.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ replied Mainstone, overjoyed by the news. ‘We’ll still be able to see what happens.’

  Hours later, Mainstone’s colleague sent another email. It began with two words: ‘Oh no … !’

  * * * * *

  Brisbane mechanical engineer Thomas Parnell, son of pioneering electrical engineer Thomas Parnell an
d grandson of pioneering physics lecturer Professor Thomas Parnell, recently took his two sons, Thomas, 15, and Nicholas, 14, to see their great-grandfather’s enduring experiment. ‘They looked at it and said, “You’ve got to be kidding me,”’ says Parnell the Third. He remembers passing the experiment himself on the way to UQ science lectures and says his boys will learn to appreciate the experiment over time, like he has.

  ‘I’m probably a bit irreverent about it but, equally, I think it’s an extraordinary piece of physics,’ he says. ‘Grandpa Parnell was trying, I think, to educate people on the idea that there’s more of the practical in the theoretical than you think. It’s excited people for a fair while now. It’s extraordinary. And I can see the attraction, too. We have so much immediacy in our lives now. Our immediacy makes something like that a little more special.’

  Nobody saw the eighth drop because there was a malfunction in the video camera’s digital memory. The footage was lost in time and space. Now there are three video cameras trained 24 hours a day on the imminent ninth pitch drop. There’s a back-up of the back-up.

  Mainstone will not miss this one. As he stares into the black tar drop the world stares with him, more than 300 000 viewers tuning in from cyberspace. They are the custodians now. They will see Parnell’s experiment through to the 22nd century, the 23rd century. However long it takes – and it could be 200 years – for all of the wondrously uncontrollable pitch to make its laborious exit. Drop. Drop. Drop.

  ‘I could not have predicted all this some 50 years ago,’ Mainstone says. ‘But I’m now convinced that it’s something that will quite happily continue to be of interest to people around the world as these drops continue to fall, one after the other at increasingly larger intervals, and they’ll have discussions about it and the things people have written in the past will be compared to what they are writing now.’ The professor squints and stares. The drop hangs in suspension. Perfectly pendent. The little hand on the small square clock ticks around its face. Tick. Tick. Tick. And the professor smiles, not entirely certain what that sound means for him at this particular time in his life.