The Rest Is Science - Could Sound Make You Levitate?

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

Imagine: a series of objects floating in midair without magnets, strings or visible supports. With acoustic levitation sound waves alone can suspend droplets, beads and even small solids to seemingly defy gravity! In this episode of Field Notes, Hannah shows Michael this astonishing device, revealing how precisely tuned sound can manipulate matter. Behind the mesmerising floating objects lies a combination of physics, mathematics, and engineering that turns vibrations into invisible hands. How do sound waves create stable points in space? What can acoustic levitation teach us about controlling particles, studying delicate chemical reactions, or even exploring new materials? And why does watching something float so effortlessly feel like glimpsing...a little magic? Welcome to The Rest Is Science: Field Notes. Every Thursday, Hannah and Michael rummage through their personal troves of scientific treasure and source discoveries that explain our understanding the universe, oddities that scramble our brains, objects that hint at forces we’ll never see...and a few things that are essentially just plain cool. Expect deep dives into the science behind each pick, the spark that grabbed their attentions, and the sheer delight they get from sharing it all with you. They’ll also be tackling your questions, so email The Rest Is Science at [e-mail]. You can watch the Pitch Feed experiment live, here. ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠⁠https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience⁠⁠ Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠clicking here.⁠ ------------------- Video Producer: Adam ThorntonVideo & Social: Bex TyrrellAssistant Producer: Imee MarriottProducer: Becki HillsSenior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-CarterHead Of Digital: Samuel OakleyExec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research, UK. Dinosaurs walked the earth 180 million years ago. But as you know, cancer was part of their story too. Scientists have found tumors in ancient fossils. Well, that is part of the reason why cancer is a big, big part of our story, right? It's the other side of evolution. It's the most complex disease that we face. There are more than 200 types of cancer in total, each with distinct characteristics, challenges, and mysteries.

And that complexity demands scale. Cancer Research UK is the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research, with more than 4,000 scientists, doctors and nurses working across more than 20 countries in the search for answers. And then sharing their discoveries beyond borders. And the impact of this collaboration is clear, because over the last 50 years, the charity's pioneering work has helped to double cancer survival in the UK.

That is more people who are living longer, better lives. can show us the past, but research is shaping the future. And for more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancer researchukuk.org forward slash rest is science. Would you like to levitate, Michael? I would love to every day. Wouldn't it be good? Well, today on field notes, I'm going to give you that chance. There's a couple of caveats, small ones, don't worry about them. We'll come to them in a bit. But I have got a little acoustic levitator with me. Oh, really?

Have you ever played with one of these? I have, but one that was so small, it could only levitate like a tiny little bead of styrofoam, polystyrene, for those of you across the Atlantic, and it was so undramatic. Exactly what I've got. Oh, no. Does it also make this noise that's like, and you're like, oh, please. Okay. Yeah, I've got that in some calculations.

Let me say, let me say, I've never played with one, but I can't, I don't believe it's possible, especially something as cool to levitate as styrofoam. Oh, fuck. Oh, my gosh. So that's what you brought me. You brought me a sonic levitator. And some calculations about how many of these things you need to levitate you. Okay, so what a wonderful intro. Aren't you excited to show this to me now?

I've never backed myself more, Michael. This is, uh, I mean, I should have. manage your expectations a bit better, shouldn't I really? I should have said. Yeah, I think, I think so. But I will say that, that I've experienced it, but I think that you talking about it and explaining it will show me why it is so cool. We'll see, shall we? Okay. A friend of mine at Cambridge University has been toying around with this little acoustic levitator. Incidentally, actually, you know, math departments are completely full of people who care a lot about acoustics. Did you know this?

Yes, I bet. Like jet engines, for example, when they were first created, they were so noisy that for starters it was like completely unworkable for commercial flight. But secondly, the vibrations were so dramatic that they would break the components inside of the engine. And who did they turn to to make them all quiet, the mathematicians, my friend? Right. There is a guy who, a mathematician who works in the same department as me, who is now working on a car seat that essentially works as noise cancellation for the road around you. Doesn't that sound nice? Oh, wow. Is it safe? I feel like I need to hear some of these noises.

Do you? I think maybe if you're a passenger, maybe it's not for the driver. Okay, okay. Anyway, there's just a lot of people who are working on acoustics and one of them has got this little acoustic levitator. So here is the acoustic levitator. It's a little 3D printed box. My friend is Matthew Nethercote, by the way, who let me steal this in order to impress you, Michael, which was... I'll try a lot harder next time. I'll put it that way.

No, no, no, no. This looks cool. This looks cooler than the one that I've seen. It's like a hand-sized. And it looks like some kind of Star Trek teleporter. It does, yeah. So you've got two bits, one at the top, one at the bottom. And inside there's a dome effectively that is filled with lots and lots of tiny little speakers

that are pool pointing towards this kind of central space. Sort of, hmm, how can you describe it? I never watched Star Trek. But isn't there some device in there where you teleport people? You can sort of imagine stepping in here and being teleported. I think that's the best way to describe it. Yeah, right. But those are speakers pointed up and down, focused on some point in the very middle in between them.

The idea here then is that sound is a wave, right? Sound is like you have this membrane on a speaker that vibrates backwards and forwards. And as it does so, it pushes and then pulls the air that surrounds it, creating this wave. Now, if you have all of these speakers that are tuned to exactly. the right frequency and pointing in exactly the right way, then what should happen is that in some places the vibrations will sort of add up together and in some places those vibrations will cancel each other out. So that you should get some little effectively jail cells in here of air where the air is perfectly still while all the air around it is like vibrating like

crazy. So is it running now? Is it producing the sound? It is, which I can't hear. I assume you can't hear, but I can't hear it either. A hundred meters down the road, there are several dogs that are now crying because it is so high pitched. Very high pitched. Okay, so the idea is that sound waves are compressed. There are waves of air that's being compressed and rarefied. And if you get what, like two compressed waves side to side, you can like hold something

in the air. Exactly. Now, can you change the frequency of the sound with this device and change where these levitation points are. Not this one, unfortunately. I think I need to write to Matthew Nethercoat and tell him he needs to make a more impressive device. I'm not down on this.

I think it's really cool. I think it looks really neat. I know what you're thinking. That sounds fun, but I want to go. I won't need to levitate me. Or at least an ant, you know? That would be... Well, yeah, no, I've seen them levitate living frogs in laboratories with

very powerful versions of this. And I'm wondering what the applications are beyond the amusement. Well, okay, let's stick on the fun for a second here, because let's say the average human weighs about, I don't know, what you reckon, 75 kilograms, something like that. That's what I've done with my calculations. This particular levitator has 72 little transducers right around here. So if you wanted to raw power lift a human,

you're going to need 216 million of them, which is... Oh. I would say quite a lot. That's a lot, but let's say you did it. Let's say you did it. Would you be able to hear the sound or would it still be ultrasonic? Well, here's the thing. You need them to be like super, super loud, right?

In order to actually have the sort of strength between them to be able to lift this human. You can get them up to about 120 decibels, but remember you've got 216 million of them. Now, the slight problem is that any sound above 170 decibels can cause organ and joints. damage just because it vibrates you so violently that you start to implode. Anything above 240 decibels, that would be lethal. Wow. And so at 216 million, I think that the reality is we could levitate you. It's just, it would be so loud, your head might explode.

Small caveat. It's worth it. It's worth it. You wanted drama. My God, I can give you drama. So, okay, this is like a cute little fun toy that you can play with. but there is actually a reason behind this stuff. So in the 1960s, 1970s, NASA, they developed these kind of levitators,

partly because they wanted to see what it would be like to have effectively a microgravity environment. Oh, yeah. You can imagine if you were like suspending instead of tiny little balls here, you were suspending cells or like other sort of organic matter. It's effectively the same as like being suspended in zero gravity. you're not going to feel the force of the earth because it's counteracted by this little cage of air that is wrapped around it. You can also put liquids in this, which is kind of interesting, but there are some quite interesting medical applications of this stuff. If people have kidney stones in their body, what you can do is with acoustic beams is nudge small fragments of kidney stones.

You sort of break them up with ultrasound and then you nudge them into positions in the body where they could sort of be naturally cleared. Huh. There's also, this is the one that I really like, you can have a targeted drug delivery with this. So you can create a sort of micro bubble, load it up with a drug. You can inject it. But then if you want to move it to very specific areas of the body and then burst the bubble using ultrasound to release the medication. And this is particularly useful if you have something like chemotherapy, for instance. So some sort of like drug that has like a really bad. toxicity and you want to reduce the side effects that it can interact with other parts of your tissue on the way to the bit that it actually wants to interact with. There's also like this idea that you can use these kind of acoustic levitators. I mean essentially what you have here is like a beam of sound that moves stuff. Yeah. And it can move anything made of matter, whereas trying to move things around in a body with like magnets or something would require what you're moving to respond to the magnet. And they're ultrasonic. So, they're,

They don't bother us. Yeah, just the neighborhood dogs. Yeah. The other thing, so, I mean, in general, moving things around the body, you can also use this for pill-sized cameras. So you swallow a little camera, then you want to move it around the digestive system. For instance, you can use these kind of acoustic beams to move it all around the body. Right. A little micro-cinematographer could make a movie in my body controlling with sound waves.

And sound waves could be a lot harder to jam than, like, radio waves. In what way? Go on. Well, I mean, like, if you want to control something remotely using radio waves, there's going to be some limitations on when you can use those and through what mediums, but perhaps sound can fill in the gaps. Because if you think about it, if you happen to be swallowed by a human and we're sitting inside of their stomach and someone was shouting from outside, you would expect to hear it. Like, the sound vibration would still get inside. In fact, actually, you know, you know that whole thing about. babies when they're in their mother's stomachs. There's certain frequencies which they hear that end up being really soothing. Yeah. And there's things that they see as well. Like skin is not completely opaque. The growing, developing baby in the womb isn't in darkness. Especially if the mom's topless and bright sunlight, it's like kind of like red in the womb. Oh wow. To the human eye. Yeah. Yeah. And they've done studies where they've projected like using lasers, different shapes onto the womb. that the baby could see.

Yeah. This is, of course, a baby that's developed enough to have a retina. And the babies react to shapes. In fact, they're seen to react to and look at and stare longer at shapes that are similar to a human face. It's instinctive. Wow. I'm being serious.

Like, this pattern right here, they don't seem to care very much about. Okay, that's three dots in a triangle shape. But they will, for like, twice as long follow and look at an upside down triangle of dots, which is like two, two eyes in a mouth. I mean, it's essentially like your, I always think in terms of a British plug whenever I see this experiment, it's sort of like, hold a British plug in the correct orientation, baby don't care, turn it upside down, baby cares.

Really? Of course. I've only seen it for babies that have been born. Yeah. Well, apparently it would work on a prenatal baby. What can they hear? Could they hear this? Like, is this frequency that this machine's running at?

Is it something that, like, teenagers can hear but not old people? Like the mosquito noise or the... Yeah. Did you have that in the States where they had a device that was designed to stop teenagers from hanging out in public areas? Yeah, and I experienced one at this show I did. Or I was like, why is that buzzing noise out here? And all the guys working there were like, oh, you can hear it. I don't know if I could hear it still.

This was years ago. But I was really proud that I could still hear this noise. It's supposed to scare away, or not scare away. It was supposed to annoy juvenile delinquents. Well, this thing is about 20,000 hertz. So it's quite possible that young children could hear this. I have a young child in my house. Should I go and ask them?

Well, yeah, let's do an experiment. Shall I for real? Yeah, and see if they can guess when it's on or off to see if they're getting it. Okay, here's our test subject. Who's your test subject? Okay. You want you to have a listen and see, you tell me when you can hear it. Can you hear that?

Yes. Can you hear that? No. Oh. Can you hear that? Yeah. Can you? I can't hear that.

I can't hear any of these. Wow, Super Kid. Superkid. Superkids, 19,000 Hertz. I stopped at about 12,000. But this acoustic levitator that you've got, it's using 20,000 hertz. It's 22. 22,000.

22. Wow. Okay. So it's shaking the air. 22,000 times a second, creating waves of compressed air separated by rarefied air. And these waves like collide from the top and bottom. And what's going on? The compressed waves can sink up and create an even more compressed wave.

And if a rarefied area and a compressed one meet, they just make normal air. Exactly. And this somehow creates like a cage of air pressure that can hold very lightweight objects. Exactly. Try and put something in that's much larger and it will just flop around all over the place and eventually fall. But if you get something that's the right size and not too heavy so that it doesn't sort of overwhelm the force that's being exerted by the surrounding air pressure, then yeah, you can have it successfully levitate. I mean, I always thought levitation was a bit of a science fiction myth, but it turns out it actually isn't. Well, yeah, I mean, I got stuck on defining levitation because this isn't levitation. It's using force of air pressure. to resist gravity. How dare you?

It's not touching the ground, Michael. You're being way too strict with your definition. Okay, so what about, do airplanes levitate? They're not touching the ground. Shush, shush, shush, shush, now. Let's go to a break. Okay, let's go to a break. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research, UK.

We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins. After years of work, cancer research UK scientists are launching a clinical trial of lung vacs, the first vaccine designed to prevent lung cancer. It builds on TracerX, the world's largest cancer evolution study, which tracked lung cancer cells over many years to uncover the disease's earliest warning signs. Lung Vax is designed to train the immune system to spot these signs early on, destroying 40

cells before cancer develops. So it's not treatment, but preventative, with the potential to stop lung cancer. before it starts. The first stage of the trial starts this year, focusing on people at higher risk. It shows what long-term research makes possible. For more information about cancer research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancer researchukuk-org forward slash the rest is science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Every second, your cells release millions of microscopic signals, fragments of DNA, tiny, molecules, little molecular whispers.

And scientists are trying to work out how to read them. It's called a liquid biopsy. And this is a test that looks for these tiny little traces of cancer through the body's fluids, often long before symptoms of cancer itself actually end up appearing. So today we're asking, can you really detect cancer from clues floating around in blood, urine, spit, and tears? Short answer, yes. Longer answer.

How? How? Okay. I mean, this is it, right? Because, okay, cancer doesn't just appear out of nowhere. It leaves these molecular fingerprints in your body, this long before symptoms end up showing. These little fragments of DNA, these proteins,

other little molecules that end up floating around your body in your bloodstream, for example, as your cells are dividing as they're growing and as they're dying. Like a sort of internal messaging system and whether you can tap into it. And the challenge is sensitivity, because you've got a lot of cells that are not cancer. Yeah.

I mean, there's a whole load of stuff. floating around your body. Well, Cancer Research UK researchers are building tools sensitive enough to detect these markers. Yeah, these faint little signals and detect them even earlier. And this is different. This is separate from traditional biopsies, right, which kind of go in. It means surgery. It means needles. It means you take tissue samples from a suspected tumor or the surrounding tissue around the tumor. And that is amazing, but it really only gives you a snapshot of one tiny area of the body at that one moment in time. But a liquid biopsy is less intrusive, and it's a liquid that has come in contact and can contain traces from all over the body.

Yeah. Yeah, like one breath, which is collecting up the molecules that have traveled around your entire body. You know, or urine or blood tests. It's a quiet revolution, right? It is testing the blood and other bodily fluids instead of the tumor without surgery. And the key thing is that because those fragments, because they can come from different parts of the tumor, it means that just a small sample. you can put these clues together and you can get a really full picture

of what's going on inside. One thing I think is really cool is that platelets, which like we've all heard about they're the things that help you heal when you get cut. They block off the blood flow so the healing can begin.

Platelets really help with this search because they also suck up these molecular traces in the blood. Yeah, these things act like little hovers, right? They're picking up tiny bits of tumor DNA all those they circulate around the body and concentrating them. And I mean,

they can help us. unlock overlooked cancer clues. Exactly. And the MRD edge technology is more like an amplifier that can make the really quiet traces loud enough for researchers to find. The whole thing about this, liquid biopsies, this isn't just a theory, this is something that's already being trialed in hospitals to monitor how well cancer treatments are already working. Yeah, the aim is precision, knowing exactly when a treatment works, when to switch course, and when cancer might return, so doctors can always be one step ahead. And cancer. for Research UK, they come into this by connecting the lab work, doing the data science, the clinical

trials that make all of this stuff possible. So it's discovery that's happening, that's in motion, it's innovation beginning to make its way towards everyday care. Of course, the goal here is that you can spot cancer early and then tailor every single decision around the individual person based on what's going on in their body at that moment in time. That's right. Doctors can detect and be aware of the smallest changes so that they can adjust treatment in real time. Yeah, right. than having long stretches between biopsies, for example. And this shifts medicine from being just reaction to prediction as well. Instead of waiting for symptoms to arrive, you can get one step ahead.

And the same science that spots cancers earlier could become part of routine checkups. Yeah, much less invasive, much more predictive. I mean, you can imagine a future where you go and have a blood test. And it is as routine as, I don't know, getting your car in for a service. Only this blood test is monitoring everything that's going on in your body. and could potentially save your life. So Cancer Research UK's researchers are bringing the future closer. They're turning detection into protection.

And what is remarkable is just how quickly this field is moving. You are getting discovery beginning to shift from the lab into hospitals. And when we learn to read the body signals, we can get ahead of cancer. We can have the best shot at beating it. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can help them, visit cancer researchuk.org forward slash rest is science. All right, we're back and we're going to answer some questions from you. I want to start with this great question from Neil who asked,

will a person ever swim faster than a shark? No. Next question. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. This is one of those questions that suffers from the problem of being a bit too broad. Like, what do you mean by a shark? Yeah. Like, there are sharks that swim really slowly. The Greenland shark only swims at about one mile per hour.

Wow. That's about 0.34 meters per second. That's extremely slow. Isn't that the one that's also like 400 years old? Yeah, yeah. And so I could out swim one of them, but I can't outlive them. Maybe it's a balancing scale. And the fastest human speed is like almost two and a half meters per second.

How does that convert to miles an hour? About five and a half miles per hour. Okay, that's pretty good. You could definitely outrun a Greenland. Is that with or without fins? That's without fins. That's just using the flesh your mother gave you. What I will say is I can definitely not swim that fast.

Yeah, that's the sort of Michael Phelps territory. No, it definitely is like a very unique speed to be traveling at. I also want to know how motivated the shark is. So I sort of feel like even fast sharks, whatever the fastest shark might be. What are you reckon the fastest shark is? I mean, not a hammerhead. They are aerodynamically useless.

I mean, Google says the fastest shark is the short fin maco, which can travel at 31 to 46 miles per hour in the water. Well, well, this is a whole jumble of units we've got going on here, isn't? That's a whole jumble. How many fathoms per day? Not per month. Look, the point of what I love. about the question, though, is that it's framed by asking, will a person ever swim faster than a shark?

As though human swim speed is something that is changing and it's getting better and better. And in some ways it is, this also belies that kind of like that modern sensibility that like things are just going to get better and stronger and records keep getting broken. And in some ways, it is true. Like, we do learn more about nutrition and swimming techniques and also swimming technologies like fins in swimsuits. I think there were some swimsuits that were allowed in Beijing at the Olympics that are no longer allowed. But because they were allowed for that one Olympics event, a bunch of records were set. Yeah. And so we're at the point where the limits of human bodies are now being augmented and we're going beyond it.

Because I think that's the thing actually, particularly about swimming, is that you have to wear a swimsuit, right? You can't do nudie swimming. That would just not be okay. And so you have to have some kind of, you know, designed object on your body. What do you mean you can't swim naked? I mean, you can if you want to, but maybe not in competition in the Olympics. Right, right. Maybe not two and a half meters per second, Michael.

That's what I'm saying. Right. But those particular swimsuits, they had a couple of design features. So one was that because what you really want to do is you want to basically have your butt higher in the water. as high in the water as you can. So they had like some elements of buoyancy in them. They also along the sort of skin of the swimsuit, they had like a sort of microscopic design which allowed the water to slip over it much easier so that you didn't get this sort of any resistance or drag on the surface. And then I think also they were basically like spanks.

They were basically like four sizes too small for the human that was wearing them to make them as streamlined as possible, sort of minimize their surface area. Fascinating. Okay. So all of those things, you know, those things are, oh, actually, one other thing about swimming, in fact, this idea that humans can swim faster as time goes on. When I was a kid, swimming lessons, they would say that you have a flat palm and that your fingers are stuck together. But actually, now they have a PhD in fluid dynamics, Michael, I know that that is not true. I know that that is not the best way to swim. Because, in fact, actually, if instead of having your hand flat, you have it sort of cupped. But also, if your fingers are slightly further apart, what happens is that, for starters, you're just displacing more water by having your hand curved. So basically, if you have your hand in like a natural relaxed position, what happens is you get these little eddies that appear,

this turbulence that appears between your fingers. Uh-huh. That are, you know, if you get it at the right distance, that are impenetrable to water going through. So you effectively increase the size of your hands. by having your finger slightly apart. Basically, you want to think of your hand as these big scoops going through the water. Right.

And those eddy currents are almost like webbing made of water that stops water from going through. That's really cool. So maybe science will make people swim faster. I know. Watch out, Mako Shark. Thanks for the question, Neil. You want to take Ellie's question? Yeah, go on.

Ellie asks, if you had to invent a completely useless yet scientifically fascinating machine, what would do it and what basic principle of physics or chemistry would it exploit? Okay, I've had this idea for a long time. I want to build a clock

that uses a titration process to tell time. So what you've got, in my mind, you've got like a beaker with some kind of solution in it

and you're dripping another chemical into it at a regular interval like one drop per second. And you do this all day. All right. And the more of the above chemical falls into the one below, the more the color changes. So, for example, maybe it's becoming more and more red throughout the day. And then on the clock, there's a gradient from

clear to red, and you just like turn it until it matches the color of the beaker. And that happens to be the time that it is. So to check the time, you just go, let's look at this, how red is it? And you move the dial until the reds match. And you go, oh, wow, guys, it's afternoon now. I like that so much. I've actually wanted something like an hourglass for a really long time that lasts much longer than an hour, right? I wanted one. You know, there's some things that you want to do every couple of weeks, right? Every couple of weeks maybe you want to, like, water your plants, for example. And what I really wanted is a physical device that you can turn over, leave it, and then know when two weeks is up.

Unfortunately, if you use sand or something, they end up being so gigantic that they're completely impractical. It's like the size of a room. I know, I know. Well, there's an hourglass in Japan that goes for an entire year. Is there? How big is it? It's really big and it's supported way up on these just giant metal truss. And on New Year's Eve, every year, they turn it over.

And it's beautiful. And it's one of my dreams to go and visit it. Oh, that's incredible. But this idea of having a liquid that drops, I like this a lot because there's the, there's that experiment, the pitch drop experiment. You know about this, I imagine? Yeah, the longest running experiment. Since 1927.

So this is... Wait, so it's going to be hitting its 100-year anniversary in a couple years. That'll be a special moment. Should we work out a way to get the rest of science to go and visit it for its 100-year? Yeah, we should do a special celebratory episode there as we watch it. For those who don't know, the pitch drop is an experiment looking at the viscosity of pitch, a material that is so, so not flowing, that it pours out of the funnel that it's... in like, well, I mean, so slowly that it's been almost 100 years and it's still coming out.

Yeah. Yeah. I think there's only been, it's like tar, right? It's like the kind of thing that you would use to sort of waterproof your roof, like that kind of thing. There's about one drop every decade or so. Wow. I think that there's an online camera. I think that there's like a live feed.

Yeah, the feed. Okay. So the experiment uses pitch that is 100 billion times more viscous than water. Wow. That's incredible. Absolutely incredible. Can I just read you? I want to read.

This is so fascinating. Please. In 1927, Professor Parnell heated a sample of pitch and poured it into a glass funnel with a sealed stem. He allowed the pitch to cool and settle for three years. And then in 1930, he cut the funnel's stem. And since then, the pitch has slowly dripped out of the funnel. It took eight years for the first drop to fall and more than 40 years for another five

to follow. My gosh. Parnell though, he never got to see it, even though he was in the same building for decades. And when he died, I think no one had ever, you sort of know that it's happened, but you come back in and you're like,

damn it, I missed the drop. And you've got to wait another 10 years. Someone who took over the experiment after Thomas Parnell, was like completely obsessed with it. So he was waiting like 40 years, set up loads of cameras, sometimes was sleep near the apparatus

when he thought that a pitch was imminent. Right. In 1977, son apparently he left the lab for a few minutes and then the drop fell and then in 1988 the next time it fell again but the camera had jammed and then in 2000 he set up a webcam and the webcam crashed right before the drop he is no way his career trying to see a single drop in the jar and yeah died without having seen it what a life i feel like you could do a pitch shop experiment timer at home and you would just set a knob to the temperature for the speed that you wanted and you could set it for

a fast speed or like remind me in six months. Yeah. Let's invent that. I think I think that's something that's the gentleman to write it down. You could do. You could definitely do that. I'd like a two-week pitch drop timer please. On that note, I'm going to go and water my plants and try and levitate some household items acoustically. Oh, sounds like a fun time. Very good. We'll see you next. time. Yeah, we'll see you next time.