IS this the world's most boring live stream?

Well, yes. But that could all change anywhere between the next five seconds and the next 12 months.

It's been 12 years and four months since the last time this glass jar at the University of Queensland saw any action - exactly the same amount of time it took something to happen before that.

But what exactly will happen? As a famous scientist once said, we're glad you asked.

That blob of tar pitch stretching down from the cocktail glass shaped thing will fall on the eight other blobs settled below it.

Excited much? Trust us, it gets better.

I can't wait. Take me to the live feed of the pitch drop experiment immediately

In 1927, UQ's Professor Thomas Parnell wanted to prove to his students that some things that appear solid are in fact liquid.

He heated up a sample of tar pitch - a solid polymer that can shatter if you hit it hard enough - and poured it into the funnel you see in the picture.

He sealed it and left it for three years to set, then cut the end of the funnel. Eight years later, the first drop fell through the funnel.

And here we are, 82 years later, waiting for the ninth drop to fall. Waiting to be the first humans to ever lay eyes on it falling, in fact, because the pitch has a frustrating tendency to shed its small load at exactly the time no one's watching.

Even modern technology couldn't snare the eighth drop on November 28, 2000.

"I certainly remember it," the experiment's current custodian, Professor John Mainstone, said.

"I was overseas ... secure in the knowledge that if the eighth drop decided to fall in my absence, we had it covered – thanks to the new video surveillance system that had been installed."

Prof Mainstone received an email from UQ telling him it looked like some action was on the cards, and lo and behold, the eighth drop fell while he was in London.

"My complacency was short-lived," he said.

"Soon after came the bad news that the recording section of the surveillance equipment had failed."

Oh dear.

Five years later, Prof Mainstone received some compensation in the form of an Ig Nobel Prize awarded to him and posthumously to Parnell for maintaining the world's longest continuously running laboratory experiment.

So will Prof Mainstone be caught out this time around? He believes No 9 is unlikely to fall until 2013 - air conditioning has seen its rate slow in the past couple of decades - so he's not getting all jittery just yet.

Although there is some cause for tension in the fact that power to the live feed gets cut every now and then by demolition work around the Parnell Building in which the experiment is housed...

"Steps have been taken", Prof Mainstone assures us, to ensure "fairly rapid automation restoration of the live feed" following outages.

"If this ninth drop can outwit the greatly improved surveillance system now in place I think I might have to agree with my late mother who was convinced that physicists - her son included - will just have to accept the fact that some things will always remain a mystery," he told news.com.au.

"Be that as it may, I have been impressed by the advances made in recent years in the area of data recovery, so in reality I’m optimistic that 'all will be revealed' to the waiting world this time around."

