Locals call it “ten-two-fifty” – Nobel Laureates have lectured here, Massachusetts Institute of Technology presidents were inducted here and plenty of students have left their slide rule behind while cramming – but on Thursday, MIT Building 10, Room 250, was home of the 34th Ig Nobel Prize ceremony.
The event was moderated and led by “chief airhead” Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research magazine – a digital publication for science that makes readers laugh, then think.
The first in-person ceremony since the pandemic featured a new mini-opera in four acts throughout the night. Each performance had something to do with this year’s theme of Murphy’s law, which is essentially that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Mentions of the law received cheers from the audience.
Presentations were accompanied by 24/7 lectures – interludes between awards in which speakers including Nobel laureates explain their research twice: first, a complete technical description in 24 seconds, as anything longer would be met with a gaggle of Improbable staff members dancing with arms linked in something between a cancan and Irish jig, until the lecturer is kicked physically offstage; and again in a seven-word description anyone could understand.
As per tradition, guests at the sold-out event were invited to throw paper airplanes once during opening remarks and again before goodbyes.
The awards speak for themselves.
For example, Jimmy Liao got the Ig Nobel Prize in physics “for demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout.”
In his acceptance speech, rife with alliterations and jargon about fluid dynamics, gesturing while wielding a trout puppet and pool noodle, Liao compared the bodies of dead fish to that of a sailboat moved by the current – it would appear that in death the water swims the fish.
A group of scientists from Japan were awarded the physiology prize for “discovering that most mammals can breathe through their anus” – a hypothesis inspired by intestinal breathing in Japanese loach fish.
The presentation was followed by a demonstration in which the researchers mimed administering a liquid form of oxygen rectally on each other.
Presented by Nobel laureates, each prize includes a $10 trillion bill – of Zimbabwean origin, taped to a box that’s near-impossible to open unless broken, containing historical documents related to Murphy’s Law and the prize itself, a sheet of paper, enclosed within.
Acceptance speeches were kept brief by Miss Sweetie Poo, an 8-year-old girl in a pink dress who would march up to the podium and interrupt laureates midsentence with a booming “Please stop, I’m bored” – again and again until the floor was clear.
The biology prize honored the research of the late Fordyce Ely and William E. Peterson for investigating “how and when cows spew their milk” in response to fear – an experiment that the five Nobel laureates in attendance helped demonstrate by exploding paper bags around a cat plushie placed on top of a volunteer wearing an inflatable full-body four-legged cow costume as another volunteer dressed in construction worker garb pulled several jugs of milk from underneath the first. The cat was removed from the experiment as “unnecessary.”
The award was accepted by Ely’s daughter and grandson, Jane Wells and Matt Wells.
Psychologist B.F. Skinner received the Ig Nobel peace prize posthumously for his “experiments to see the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide the flight paths of those missiles.” Julie Vargas, Skinner’s daughter, accepted the award on behalf of her father, thanking the magazine for “finally acknowledging [Skinner’s] most important contribution to science” – his discovery of operant conditioning and schedules of reinforcement notwithstanding.
The ceremony was followed by the first of two receptions: A “Face to Face” event at the MIT Museum on Saturday, where new winners would field questions from each other and the public. The other will take place in November at the Miraikan Science Museum in Tokyo.
A stronger
Please consider making a financial contribution to maintain, expand and improve Cambridge Day.
We are now a 501(c)3 nonprofit and all donations are tax deductible.
Please consider a recurring contribution.