With science increasingly coming under attack, using humor as a way to get people interested in scientific research is more important than ever, the founder of the satirical Ig Nobel prizes said.
Since 1991, the Ig Nobel prizes have celebrated the sillier side of science, handing out awards — and 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollar notes — at often-raucous ceremonies in Boston every year for genuine research projects that inadvertently have an absurd side.
The research “has to make people laugh and then think,” said Ig Nobel founder Marc Abrahams, who is also the editor of the Annals of Improbable Research magazine, which organizes the prizes.
Photo: AFP
As the serious Nobel prizes were awarded in Stockholm this week, several events were held in Paris featuring Ig Nobel laureates presenting their work while paper airplanes rained down — a long-running Ig Nobel gag.
Among those speaking were French physicist Marc-Antoine Fardin, who investigated whether cats could be solids and liquids, and Italian researcher Daniel Maria Busiello for his work about avoiding clumpiness while making the iconic Italian pasta dish, cacio e pepe.
“If you’re laughing at something, you are paying attention,” Abrahams said.
The idea of the Ig Nobels is to capture a person’s attention — even if just for three seconds, he said.
Then maybe when they are telling their friends about it later they might realize it is actually “really interesting,” he added.
At a time when scientific research is being “threatened and actively destroyed,” particularly under the administration of US President Donald Trump, many people “have been telling us that now what we’re doing has become much more important,” Abrahams said.
Several of this year’s prize winners decided not to attend the ceremony in September out of concern about traveling to the US under Trump, he added.
At first, some scientists were suspicious of the gag prize, but the Ig Nobels have now become something of an institution — few refuse the honor, Abrahams said.
There is little antagonism with the real Nobel prizes. In fact, Nobel laureates hand out Ig Nobels every year — often wearing funny hats. One of them, British physicist Andre Geim, has even won both prizes.
Each year, 10 winners are chosen from thousands of nominees sent to Abrahams.
An increasing number — more than 10 percent — are researchers nominating themselves.
“They almost never win,” Abrahams said.
Indeed, the phone call when he tells scientists they have won is often “the first moment any of them realized that what they had done is funny,” he said with a laugh.
Dutch biologist and Ig Nobel laureate Kees Moeliker said the prizes award scientists for doing their job: being curious, discovering what is happening then publishing what they found.
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