Funny Science: What is the Ig Nobel Prize and Who Receives It?

Have you ever tried using dead spiders as tweezers? Or pigeons instead of a GPS for missiles? Maybe you’ve wondered why geologists like licking stones? Analysed the tonal variations of a cat’s purring in response to different human intonations? Or attempted to get a worm drunk? If the answer is “yes”, then you’ve probably heard of the Ig Nobel Prize, and perhaps, you may even have been one of its annual laureates.

The Ig Nobel Prize was invented and established by Marc Abrahams, an apparently quite sensible American editor with a degree in applied mathematics from Harvard. The problem was that Abrahams was less interested in applied mathematics than in humour and satire – he wrote short stories and jokes in the genre of “scientific humour”, and later, after graduating, founded the Annals of Improbable Research. This journal, which was a parody of incomprehensible scientific journals, published articles and essays about the most unusual, paradoxical, and sometimes insane research. For example, one could find articles on topics like “Comparing Apples and Oranges”, “Does a Cat Always Land on Its Feet?” or “What Is Flatter: Kansas or a Pancake?” Abrahams published his journal in Massachusetts, home to some of America’s leading scientific institutions – Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The journal didn’t bring much profit, but it did bring something else. Swarms of self-taught scientists, mad inventors, and unrecognised geniuses (and sometimes just plain eccentrics) flocked to Abrahams with their scientific works, inventions, revolutionary discoveries, theories, and hypotheses. For some reason, all these people wanted Abrahams' patronage to get to Stockholm for the Nobel Prize ceremony (funded by the Nobel Foundation, of course). The editor initially tried to explain to these oddballs that he had no connection to the Alfred Nobel Foundation, but this often didn’t help – and Marc had to spend hours listening to wild theories or the results of paradoxical research. At some point, quantity turned into quality – Abrahams realised that some of these discoveries and studies were quite witty and clearly deserved public attention, at least for their non-trivial approach to the subject of study. They certainly didn’t qualify for the Nobel Prize, so the editor gathered like-minded enthusiasts and together they founded a new award, naming it the Ig Nobel Prize.

Marc explained the necessity of this new prize as follows:

“Our prize is orthogonal to the Nobel Prize. Curiosity leads to more curiosity, and once people start asking questions, at that moment they become scientists. They are no longer just skimming the surface of phenomena; they begin to dig deeper.”

Photo: The Ig Nobel Prize was invented and established by Marc Abrahams, Source: Wiki

The Ig Nobel Prize was established in 1991, and since then, every year at the beginning of October (at the same time the Nobel Prize laureates are announced), the Ig Nobel Committee awards 10 prizes “for achievements that make people laugh first, and then make them think.” The prize sum varies, but generally, it’s a “substantial amount” – for example, in 2020, it was 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars (about 10 US dollars). Notably, many real Nobel laureates (albeit in fake glasses, with false beards or moustaches) attend the ceremony to present their “alternative” colleagues with their awards. The ceremony takes place in the lecture hall of Sanders Theatre at Harvard, is broadcast on radio and TV, and is also streamed live on the prize’s website.

It’s worth noting that the early years’ laureates were mostly real scientists and experts in various fields of science and culture. For example, the writer Erich von Däniken, the most famous proponent of the ancient astronaut hypothesis and author of the conspiracy bestseller Chariots of the Gods, or American financier Michael Milken, founder of the “junk bond market”. The theoretical physicist Edward Teller, the developer of the hydrogen bomb, also made the list “for embodying a new understanding of the world”, as did the writer and Scientologist L. Ron Hubbard for his book on Dianetics, which may have benefited a portion of humanity.

However, with each passing year, the number of true eccentrics among the prize’s laureates steadily increased. For instance, in 1993, American mathematician Robert Faid presented the public with his calculations, which described the odds of Mikhail Gorbachev being the Antichrist (the odds, by the way, were quite low: 1 in 710,609,175,188,282,000). Nominees in psychology, Shigeru Watanabe and Junko Sakamoto from Keio University, conducted a series of experiments during which they successfully taught pigeons to distinguish between Picasso’s and Monet’s paintings, while biologist P. Fong from Gettysburg College received his award for contributing to the ease of life and reproduction of edible bivalve molluscs through the use of Prozac. 

Biologists, in general, proved to be some of the most inventive laureates. Who else would think of documenting the first scientifically recorded instance of homosexual necrophilia in wild ducks or studying the courtship behaviour of ostriches towards British farmers? Or what about the discovery of a highly developed shock absorber in woodpeckers that protects the bird from headaches, or comparing the jumping distance of fleas living on dogs versus cat fleas (in case you’re interested, dog fleas jump farther)? Attaching long prosthetics to chicken legs to model the gait of prehistoric dinosaurs, or spending hours observing dung beetles to conclude that when lost, the beetle navigates by the Milky Way.

Physicists and chemists, too, live up to their high status as “Ig Nobel laureates”. For example, an entire international team from Australia and the US discovered a way to restore the original structure of denatured protein – that is, they learned how to make boiled eggs raw again. A group of Japanese chemists developed a wasabi fire alarm for deaf people, calculating the exact amount of wasabi needed to be sprayed in a room to wake someone up during a fire. And, of course, the famous “dripping pitch experiment”, initiated by physicists in 1927, which continues to this day, did not escape an Ig Nobel Prize. The essence of the experiment is to determine the frequency at which drops fall from a highly viscous liquid (which, by formal criteria, is more of a solid). To this end, a special apparatus was created at the University of Queensland – a funnel with a piece of bitumen and a container beneath it. By the time the prize was awarded in 2005, only the eighth drop had fallen; in 2015, the ninth drop fell. If you think your job lacks purpose, think of the Queensland professors who have been passing the role of “keeper” of the experimental sample from one to another for nearly a century.

In 2024, at the recent award ceremony, the Ig Nobel laureates were on form once again. Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita received the prize in botany for proving the hypothesis of “vision in plants” using the example of the South American plant Boquila trifoliolata, which can imitate the leaves of plastic plants placed nearby. A team of chemists from Amsterdam (where else!) used alcohol and chromatography to categorise drunk and sober worms, Japanese physiologists discovered that some mammals can breathe through their anus, thereby finding an alternative way to supply oxygen to patients without ventilators, and a Swiss-German-Belgian group of pharmacists found that placebo drugs causing painful side effects are more effective than fake drugs without any complications.

Of course, the Ig Nobel Prize was primarily created to amuse and remind everyone that science isn’t just about boring formulas and monotonous experiments, but who knows which of these discoveries might unexpectedly and dramatically influence future scientific and technological progress?