If you dismiss ideas such as a roller-coaster ride curing asthma – or that wearing socks outside of your shoes could help prevent slipping on ice, or that swearing could help relieve pain, or, weirder still, that organisations would become more efficient if promotions were made at random – as funny and improbable, you may want to think again.
All these ideas, and many more – like determining that microbes cling to bearded scientists; and collecting whale snot (slang for nasal mucus or dried nasal mucus) using a remote-control helicopter – won this year's Ig Nobel Prizes at a ceremony held here on September 30 this year.
Instituted in 1991, the Ig Nobel Prizes event is an American parody of the Nobel Prizes (which, incidentally, will be held next week in Stockholm), and is organised by the scientific humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR) every October at a ceremony at Harvard University's Sanders Theater in Cambridge.
The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative, and spur people's interest in science, medicine and technology. They are given for 10 achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think", according to Mach Abrahams, editor of AIR.
This year, eight of the 10 new winners journeyed to Harvard at their own expense to accept the prizes. The trip may have been worth their while since they received their prizes at the hands of five genuine Nobel laureates — Sheldon Glashow, Roy Glauber, Frank Wilczek, James Muller, and William Lipscomb.
A microscopic theme
The theme of the 20th annual Ig Nobel Prizes was 'Bacteria' and the ceremony included a mini-opera called 'The Bacterial Opera' about the bacteria that live on a woman's front tooth, and about that woman. Every winner was permitted a maximum of 60 seconds to deliver an acceptance speech; the time limit was enforced by a cute, but implacable, eight-year-old girl.
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In keeping with its satirical tone, this year's prize winners were awarded 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars (which are not in use from April 2009) and the organisers also took digs at management practices, the collapse of banks the world over, and the more recent episode of the BP oil spill.
For instance, the Economics prize was awarded to the executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar "for creating and promoting new ways to invest money — ways that maximise financial gain and minimise financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof".
The Chemistry prize was awarded to Eric Adams of MIT, Scott Socolofsky of Texas A&M University, Stephen Masutani of the University of Hawaii, and BP [British Petroleum], "for disproving the old belief that oil and water don't mix".
No one came forward to accept the 'Economics' prize, and BP had no representative.
So, what's the point?
Do these 'silly' awards make one think? For instance, at the 2009 ceremony, Public Health Prize winner Dr Elena Bodnar demonstrated her invention — a brassiere that, in an emergency, could be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander.
She was assisted by Nobel laureates Wolfgang Ketterle, Orhan Pamuk, and Paul Krugman. Dr Bodnar says the contraption is getting a good response and is available for sale the world over.
Regardless of what one thinks of these awards, many of the winners are domain experts.
In 2009, for instance, Christopher F Chabris – Assistant Professor of Psychology Union College (taught at Harvard too) – demonstrated that, when people pay close attention to something, they may overlook anything else – even a woman in a gorilla suit, prompting him to write a book The Invisible Gorilla.
"The findings have many implications – like those who meet with an accident on the highway, at time, complain that they did not see anyone heading their way," explains Chabris, adding: "They could be suffering from a 'memory illusion' or just be pre-occupied."
He is now researching how 'collective intelligence' can be used to solve problems. Chabris, and winners like him, assure they will give us many things to think about.
And, this year’s Ig Nobel prize goes to...
ENGINEERING: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote-control helicopter
MEDICINE: Simon Rietveld of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Ilja van Beest of Tilburg University, The Netherlands, for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller-coaster ride.
TRANSPORTATION PLANNING: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi of Japan, and Dan Bebber, Mark Fricker of the UK, for using slime mold to determine the optimal routes for railroad tracks.
PHYSICS: Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest of the University of Otago, New Zealand, for demonstrating that, on icy footpaths in wintertime, people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes.
PEACE: Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University, UK, for confirming the widely-held belief that swearing relieves pain.
PUBLIC HEALTH: Manuel Barbeito, Charles Mathews, and Larry Taylor of the Industrial Health and Safety Office, Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA, for determining by experiment that microbes cling to bearded scientists.
ECONOMICS: The executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar for creating and promoting new ways to invest money — ways that maximise financial gain and minimise financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof.
CHEMISTRY: Eric Adams of MIT, Scott Socolofsky of Texas A&M University, Stephen Masutani of the University of Hawaii, and BP [British Petroleum], for disproving the old belief that oil and water don't mix.
MANAGEMENT: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organisations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.
BIOLOGY: Libiao Zhang, Min Tan, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, and Shuyi Zhang of China, and Gareth Jones of the University of Bristol, UK, for scientifically documenting fellatio in fruit bats.