Watch some scientific silliness
Posted: Thursday, October 02, 2008 4:00 PM by Alan Boyle
The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, an annual celebration of silly (but serious) science, will be broadcast live on the Web from Harvard University at 7:30 p.m. ET tonight - just before yet another highly anticipated event that might make you laugh, and then make you think.
It's pure coincidence that the Ig Nobels are being awarded just before Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Sarah Palin face off in their only vice presidential debate. The Ig Nobels are timed to come before the real Nobel Prizes are announced, starting Monday. (And if the pundits are to be believed, dark matter and nanotech are the front-runners in that race.)
Even though it wasn't originally planned this way, Ig Nobel impresario Marc Abrahams, the editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, is taking the opportunity to tout the Harvard ceremony as the first half of a "laugh-and-think doubleheader."
Science that makes you laugh - and then makes you think: That's the signature of the Igs. You can expect to see sword-swallowing, paper-airplane throwing, science lectures boiled down to seven seconds, and real Nobel laureates handing out gag awards for the strangest research you've ever heard of.
Abrahams told me that the hardest part about choosing the awards is narrowing the list of ridiculous research down to just 10 winners. "The world seems to be manufacturing candidates at an ever-faster rate," he said.
Psychology journals seem to be the most fruitful sources for silly science. "Psychology has the bizarre quality as an academic field that it's both the hardest and the easiest thing to do," Abrahams said. "To really explain anything about how people behave is just hard. But to almost explain it in a way that's probably wrong - that's easy."
For years, Abrahams has been compiling the Ig Nobel tales into a series of books that, yes, make you laugh and then make you think. And he'll keep on doing it until he runs out of wrong-way research and laughable science. Which isn't likely.
"It's a confusing universe - at least to us people," Abrahams said. "We are an innately confused group. So some of us have decided it's better to laugh at that fact than to curl up into a little ball everyday."
If you're looking for reasons to uncurl yourself, tune into the Igs tonight, before the debate.
