I learned recently that one winner of an Ig Nobel prize went on to win a Nobel prize in physics. The former for levitating a frog, and the latter for discovering that you can make graphene using Scotch tape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_Geim
There are roughly 300 Ig Nobel laureates, putting the Nobel prize winner percentage at 0.3% which is ahead of most universities I suspect.
Edit: actually I guess there were roughly 300 prizes awarded but many went to multiple people, making the percentage lower. But still probably better than most universities.
>I learned recently that one winner of an Ig Nobel prize went on to win a Nobel prize in physics. The former for levitating a frog, and the latter for discovering that you can make graphene using Scotch tape.
Ironically, it is not immediately obvious which piece of research led to which prize. Scotch tape is hardly on the cutting edge of science is it?
Scotch tape exfoliation is wonderfully low tech and whimsical as a material synthesis method, if that’s what you mean, but the Nobel was for graphene itself.
I guess I agree that the levitating frog business could one day lead to very impactful scientific advances, but suppressing graphene at this point is a high bar.
I may have this wrong, but I seem to remember Andre Geim being one of the very few people to turn up to accept his Ig Nobel. He's an extremely likeable character.
> Citation: Alessandro Corbetta, Jasper Meeusen, Chung-min Lee, Roberto Benzi, and Federico Toschi, "for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do not constantly collide with other pedestrians."
> Kinetics Prize
> Citation: Hisashi Murakami, Claudio Feliciani, Yuta Nishiyama, and Katsuhiro Nishinari, "for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do sometimes collide with other pedestrians."
This was the highlight of my day because the article was written by the head editor-in-chief of my college newspaper. (I was the opinion section editor.) I haven't seen her in 25 years, but thanks to you guys, I get to read a great article and think about old friendships.
What I absolutely love about the Ig Nobels (beside the occasional chuckle and general mood improvement they bring me) is how they highlight that science can be fun. Many kids and young adults don´t want to get into science for fear of having to do research into some boring subject they don´t care about. And these show you that your research can get a completely different direction, studying upside down rhinos hanging from a helicopter or that theatre smell that weirds you out or why you breathe better after sex or if your cat is trying to tell you something. Whatever fascinates you, go ahead and study it. There´s an Ig Nobel waiting for you.
(Disclaimer: yes, you will have to do a ton of boring research. But you still can fit a rhino in between that!)
The problem is that science shouldn't be taken as entertainment for children. In the end we are slowly assimilating that boring science is disappointing and that bombastic science is the good science. This is a catastrophic move as society. Nobody expects a seat car belt to be funny and have a nice pattern of flowers. Everybody expects scientists to be able to act as sitcom comedians or fit in a cartoonist character. Why?
I think capturing interest with bombastic science is a great way to funnel people into the boring science. Showing the cool things that can be done with science, an example being AlphaGo, is a cool way to get people interested in fields like machine learning. Otherwise people don't even know the field exists, what the applications are, and never think to pursue it to begin with.
There are modern methods to teaching that embrace top-down approaches. I think a lot of kids struggle with topics like math because they're never given the applicability or told why it matters. They're just force to memorize formulas they don't care about. If you could preface these classes with "look at all this cool stuff we've achieved using math" then I think you'd find some of those kids a lot more engaged.
mngmt never mentioned children's entertainers. They simply said that they like to find humour in science and implied that they may have dallied with an inverted rhino.
I will tend myself as a counter example to your "everyone expects ..." comment. I don't expect a seat car belt to be funny nor a scientist to be a sitcom comedian. I do like to see a sense of humour flourish sometimes.
Personally I think that telling children that zoology equals to playing with rhinos in airplanes and making scientists appear as a happy Capitan America in the jungle is lying profoundly to them. Even worse; IgNobel prizes and their cherry-picked examples are perpetuating the infamous myth of "scientists are crazy people (so we should do the opposite that they say?)".
In the real life the zoologists that study rhinos in the wild live in permanent warfare against poachers and the organized crime nets connected to them. People that export rhino horns or lion teeth for big money and will not hesitate to shoot a witness. Many directors of African national parks need to be escorted by the army 24 hours a day against people that want they dead. All while cleaning baby rhino s*t and doing thousands of boring things as important (if not more) as finding a Hollywoodesque "Jurassic Park like" way to move a rhino by air.
There is not a lot of humor into seeing a species wanish in front of your very eyes. Maybe we need to improve our focus in the problem. This is a drama, not a Disney comedy.
If the ig-Nobel price people want a really big laugh, I would suggest to give the prize to the African scientists that work in this circumstances without even having the benefit of returning to a first world country several months a year. I can't think in a superior level of craziness.
Being serious and having a sense of humour is not mutually exclusive. The rhino example: the reason this research was done is exactly what you mention, saving the species. It says so in the article:
>The wild black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis) faces a serious threat from poachers in southern Africa, along with agriculture development encroaching on its turf. This is leading to too much inbreeding. So African governments have taken to occasionally relocating the rhinos to different geographical regions to mix things up a bit. The problem is that transport by truck is difficult if not impossible, given the rugged terrain, so the Namibian Ministry of Environment and Tourism (MET) has resorted to transporting the rhinos aerially. This involves sedating the ungulates (from a safe distance) with a potent opioid and then suspending the drugged rhinos by their feet under the helicopter for as long as 30 minutes. Robin Radcliffe (Cornell University) and his co-authors noted that nobody had studied the physiological effects of this practice on the rhinos.
If you look at the list, all the research that was awarded has practical applications. All of this can be used to further our knowledge of the world, to give insight into how things work. And this is what a curious mind should strive for. To look into things like no one else has done before.
I think the scientists are people like you and me. In fact, knowing a few, I know this for a fact. They have a sense of humour, a drive to explore the world with knowledge and a healthy ability to mix the two.
That moment when you realize you were a subject in a study that went on to win an Ig Nobel prize:
> Corbetta et al. set up a six-month pedestrian-tracking experiment at three train station in Eindhoven, Netherlands, and collected data from October 2014 to March 2015 with the help of four overhead Microsoft Kinect sensors.
Their Peace Prize seems more legit than the real one.
"for testing the hypothesis that humans evolved beards to protect themselves from punches to the face"
Impact Protection Potential of Mammalian Hair: Testing the Pugilism Hypothesis for the Evolution of Human Facial Hair https://doi.org/10.1093/iob/obaa005
Dan Quayle, "consumer of time and occupier of space" (as well as the then-U.S. Vice President), for demonstrating, better than anyone else, the need for science education.
I thought that Ig Nobel is given for useless work but I don't find this completely useless:
- Work about the sounds cats can make
- Work about gum bacteria
- Work about how to transport wild rhinceroses
Therefore I conclude Ig Nobel is not about useless work but about weird work and about work that is not immediately evident to be sensible in creating niche knowledge.
I agree, the winning research used to be much wilder, but they went a less iflamatory way in the recent years. When I now read about them from the 90s, there are some harsh burns.
There is some gold in this. The below prize is amazing. My phone does this occasionally and it’s very difficult to speak.
ACOUSTICS PRIZE: Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada [JAPAN] for creating the SpeechJammer — a machine that disrupts a person’s speech, by making them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay.
I love of the Ig Nobel are an asterisks on the scientific method where you talk a big game about hypothesis, documentation, falsifiability, reproduction*, peer-review, etc.
* Well, reproduction _except_ if that earned someone the Ig Nobel prize because… yeah.
There are roughly 300 Ig Nobel laureates, putting the Nobel prize winner percentage at 0.3% which is ahead of most universities I suspect.
Edit: actually I guess there were roughly 300 prizes awarded but many went to multiple people, making the percentage lower. But still probably better than most universities.