As a mocking prelude to the serious Nobel Prize season, scheduled for early October, the Ig Nobel ceremony (a pun on the adjective “ignoble”), a grand mass of improbable science, was held on Thursday, September 12 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While, due to the pandemic and post-pandemic, the last four editions were held by videoconference, the event once again took place in a real hall with a real audience that revived the tradition of throwing a shower of paper airplanes onto the stage.
Because, in celebrating improbable science, which answers the craziest questions, we don’t take ourselves too seriously. So, with complete peace of mind, true Nobel laureates, such as Esther Duflo, came to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to present the prizes in ten categories that vary from one year to the next at the discretion of the master of ceremonies, the American Marc Abrahams.
In the Ig Nobel Prize, humour and the second degree are essential. This is how we should understand the Ig Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the American project that, during the Second World War, studied the possibility of placing pigeons on missiles to provide the guidance system. To continue with the experiments with animals that would no longer exist today, let us also mention the biology category, with a 1941 study interested in the mechanism by which a cow expels its milk, in particular when it is frightened: to achieve this, paper bags were exploded near the head of a cat… placed on the back of said cow.
Another animal example in physics, with a paper revealing that a dead trout swims very well in a turbulent environment. Finally, in physiology, a Japanese team distinguished itself by demonstrating that, like the fish called “loach”, mammals (mice and pigs) could obtain oxygen via the rectal route. Next stop, humans. Volunteers?
Random impulse
The Ig Nobel Prizes usually reserve a place of honour for work on the body. In the anatomy category, a French study was awarded, which asked whether the spirals drawn by the implantation of hair rotate in different directions depending on whether we live in the northern or southern hemisphere. In medicine, the Ig Nobel Prize was awarded to this article, which showed that a placebo that hurts is more effective than a painless placebo.
More space is needed to detail the sometimes hilarious protocols of these experiments. Note, however, that in the probability category, it was shown, after having tossed a coin 350,757 times, that there was a slight bias: 51% (and not 50%) of the time, the coin lands where it was tossed. Proof that we can give this game a boost by chance.
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