Ig Nobel Prizes awarded
10 Oct 2005 by Evoluted New Media
If you didn’t pick up a Nobel Prize, then take heart…
If you didn’t pick up a Nobel Prize, then take heart…
In the same week as the Nobel Prize winners were announced, the Ig Nobel prizes were also awarded for science that “makes people laugh and then makes them think.”
Each year, ten Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded. The selection criterion is simple. The prizes are for “achievements that cannot or should not be reproduced.”
The winners this year included John Maidstone and Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland for patiently conducting the pitch drop experiment that started in 1927 in which a glob of congealed black tar has been slowly dripping through a funnel, at a rate of approximately one drop every nine years.
The chemistry prize went to Edward Cussler of the University of Minnesota and Brian Gettelfinger of the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin, for conducting a careful experiment to settle the longstanding scientific question: can people swim faster in syrup or in water? The work was published in 2004 in the journal of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.
The Ig Nobel peace prize was awarded to Claire Rind and Peter Simmons of Newcastle University for electrically monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust was watching selected highlights from the movie "Star Wars." By learning how the visual system of the locust reacts to looming objects they hope to be able to design collision detection circuits for vehicles.
Do locusts like star wars?
Marc Abrahams is editor of the Annals of Improbable Research and chairman of the Ig Nobel Board of Governors. He is quick to point out that the Igs - as they are known - are not in competition with the Nobel Prize which go to scientists, writers, and others who excel.
“The Ig Nobel Prize isn't like that,” He explains. “The Ig honors the great muddle in which most of us exist much of the time. Life is confusing. Good and bad get all mixed up. Yin can be hard to distinguish from yang. Ditto for data from artifact and, sometimes, up from down.”
