In 1596, cartographer Abraham Ortelius looked at a map he was working on, and he noticed

something strange.

The coast of the continent looked like they had once fit together.

Ortelius noted this in his journal, noting that the vestiges of the rupture reveal themselves.

He was talking about continental drift, but it would be a full three hundred years

and a messy geological dogfight before Ortelius was proven right.

And that's because science is slow.

It's one thing to propose a theory and an entire other thing to actually prove it, to

show that your explanation is the right one.

And many of the things we most want to study are so far out of the range of human scale

and experience to be laughable.

The speed of mountains growing, or species adapting, the expanding of the universe, for most

of human existence, these magnificent transformations remain totally invisible to us, taking place

on a time scale so far outside of ours that we couldn't even see them.

But as we've learned to perceive well beyond our human senses, some scientists have figured

out another way to cheat, to find answers beyond the limits of their puny life spans,

and build experiments that long outlive their creators.

I'm Dylan Thoris, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible

and wondrous places.

And today, I'm doing a little riffing on a subject that has long fascinated me.

The strange and incredible stories of the world's longest running science experiments.

That is after this.

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