Every year, much attention is paid to which incredible achievements, in fields ranging from medicine to literature to physics to peace, will be awarded the Nobel Prize. It is bestowed in an elegant theater where the King of Sweden gives each honoree his or her medal and million dollar prize in a ceremony full of pomp and opulence.
Forgotten in the shuffle is another award, given in September of every year, which can be considered, if not quite the Nobel’s little brother, than perhaps it’s slightly delinquent younger cousin who gets drunk and embarrassing at parties. The Ig Nobel Prize is awarded in a hijinks-filled ceremony every year, and while the prizes at the Nobel may be granted by such an august figure as the King of Sweden, the Ig Nobel gets faintly bemused past Nobel Prize winners to distribute the awards to the winners at its ceremony.
The winners of Ig Nobels range from esteemed scientists to overly-dedicated amateurs to unwitting governments to companies who have somehow, knowingly or not, reached “achievements that first make people LAUGH then make them THINK,” according to the Ig Nobel Committee.
No garden-variety idiocy gets rewarded with the prestigious Ig Nobel. Most, if not all, of the accomplishments listed not only taken very seriously by the people working on them but also continue to be taken seriously in academic settings. They just sound so gut-bustingly insane upon first glance that, indeed, they are exactly the sorts of achievements to be rewarded at the kind of event which has featured awardees going onstage wearing toilet seats on their heads.
Some have taken years to accomplish the awarded goals, like the 2009 winner in medicine, Donald A. Unger, who assiduously cracked only the knuckles of his left hand every day for over 60 years to disprove a correlation between knuckle-cracking and arthritis. Others are distinguished academics producing serious research, such as Andre Geim, who, in both cases completely unironically, produced both Nobel-winning research on the properties of graphene and an Ig Nobel-awarded discovery about levitating frogs using the magnetic properties of water scaling. Still others, like the 2003 interdisciplinary research prize given for the University of Stockholm paper “Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans,” speak for themselves.
According to Mark Abrahams, founder of the Ig Nobels, “…the prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative—and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology.” Unlike the more madcap Darwin Awards, which simply celebrate acts of fatal stupidity as a method of “chlorinating the gene pool,” the focus here is not so much on the ridiculousness of the accomplishments as it is on the flashes of inspiration we can get after reading these patently odd findings.
When thinking of 2014’s physics prize winners, for example, who won for determining the amount of friction produced when someone slips on a banana peel, one may imagine scientists with physicist hair and lab coats nodding as they watch a man pratfall on a banana peel for the fourteenth time. But a physics-minded person can also think, “Hey, actually, why didn’t I think of measuring that?”
When the winners of the 2008 biology award announced their findings that fleas living on dogs can jump higher than fleas living on cats, once one gets past thoughts of “What were they smoking when they decided to test that?” and “How did they figure it out, the Flea Olympics?” one wonders WHY that would be. As the renowned science fiction writer Isaac Asimov said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but, ‘That’s funny…” Ideas which scientists may have come up with in fits of (potentially alcohol induced) abandon can indeed produce results that have real implications.
There’s food for thought as well in the 2015 peace prize awarded to the Bangkok police department for their idea of offering policemen money not to take bribes, the 2014 Medicine Prize given to doctors who used cured pork stuffed in the nasal passages to cure nosebleeds, the 2005 Peace Prize won by a researcher who monitored a locust’s brain cells as it watched scenes from Star Wars…the point of these awards is to move the mind from “What were they thinking?” to “So, why DOES it work that way, and how?”
We’ll have to wait until September 22, 2016 for the 26th Annual Ig Nobel Awards to learn the worthy recipients of awards after another year of seemingly frivolous and potentially boozy discovery, but in the meantime, we can ponder why, indeed, as the 2006 physics award winners pointed out, when we break a piece of dry spaghetti it cracks into more than two pieces. The solution to a unified field theory could be in there somewhere.