The Ig Nobel Prize

780 individuals and 20 organizations have been awarded the Nobel Prize. Since 1901, the Nobel Foundation has been awarding the most prestigious prizes in the world to people who have conferred great benefit to mankind in Peace, Literature, Chemistry, Medicine and Physics. Since 1968, Sweden’s central bank has awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. However, in 1991 a different kind of awards was constituted by the scientific humor magazine, Annals Of Improbable Research, called The Ig Nobel Prizes. (ignoble – ‘Not noble’). Perhaps you have been lucky enough to win one. It is not as improbable as it sounds, many of the 976 cowinners of the 1993 Ig Nobel Literature Prize may still be unaware of their good fortune. It's not clear whether these individuals, who coauthored a paper that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine (vol. 329, no. 10), ever exchange information or hellos, or have even heard each others' names spoken. Their paper, by the way, was remarkable for having 100 times as many authors as pages - that is what won them the prize.

These awards are given to discoveries "that cannot, or should not, be reproduced." They honour ten achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think." It says nothing as to whether a thing is good or bad, commendable or malicious. The Ig, as it is known, honors the great muddle in which most of us exist much of the time. Life is confusing. Good and bad get all mixed up. Yin can be hard to distinguish from yang. Most people go through life without ever being awarded a great, puffy prize to acknowledge that, yes, they have done something. If you win one, it signifies to one and all that you have done some thing.

Except for 3 awards in 1991 and one in 1994, the Ig Nobels honour genuine achievements in science. For example in Physics in 1991, Thomas Kyle was awarded for discovering Administratium, the heaviest element in the universe. (This was fictional; don’t check your periodic table.)

The formal ceremony takes place at Sander’s Theater in Harvard University. Genuine Nobel Laureates present the prize to the winners. Professor Emeritus (Actor Russel Johnson) from the TV series Gilligans Island also once presented the awards. The Ig Informal Lectures are held at MIT a few days later where the winners get their chance to explain the research and its relevance to the masses. These lectures often become long winded and an eight year old girl Miss Sweety Poo interrupts the proceedings by repeatedly crying out in a high pitched voice, “Please Stop. I’m Bored”.
Throwing Paper planes on the stage was a long standing tradition and the ‘Keeper of The Broom’ physics professor Roy Glauber swept the stage clean. In 2005, he was absent from the ceremony as he was on his way to accept a genuine Nobel Prize in physics.
Art and Science go hand in hand, so at the Ig Nobels, delegates from the Museum of Bad Art display pieces from their collection.

This year’s Ig Nobel winners were awarded in Physics for proof that heaps of hair or string will inevitably tangle, in Peace to the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology and the citizens of Switzerland, for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity and a team of biologists who ascertained that dog fleas jump farther than cat fleas. Two research teams were jointly awarded the Ig Nobel in Chemistry, one discovering Coke as an effective spermicide and the other for proving it is not. The Ig Nobel for Cognitive Science went for the discovery that slime moulds can solve puzzles. Feeling sick? The Ig Nobel in Medicine went for demonstrating high-priced placebos work better than cheap fake medicine.

Indians haven’t done well in the Nobel prizes but this is not the case here.
The most famous one is of Lal Bihari, of Uttar Pradesh, India, who won the prize for Peace in 2003 for a triple accomplishment: First, for leading an active life even though he has been declared legally dead; Second, for waging a lively posthumous campaign against bureaucratic inertia and greedy relatives; and Third, for creating the Association of Dead People. Lal Bihari overcame the handicap of being dead, and managed to obtain a passport from the Indian government so that he could travel to Harvard to accept his Prize. However, the U.S. government refused to allow him into the country. His friend therefore came to the Ig Nobel Ceremony and accepted the Prize on behalf of Lal Bihari. Several weeks later, the Prize was presented to Lal Bihari himself in a special ceremony in India. [NOTE: Filmmaker Satish Kaushik will be making a film about the life (and death and life) of Lal Bihari.]
L. Mahadevan, an alumnus of IIT Madras was awarded the Ig Nobel 2007 in Physics for studying how sheets become wrinkled.
Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, won the Ig Nobel 2005 for Economics for inventing an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people DO get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday.
Ramesh Balasubramaniam of the University of Ottawa, and Michael Turvey of the University of Connecticut and Haskins Laboratory, for exploring and explaining the dynamics of hula-hooping won the Ig Nobel 2004 in Physics.
The Vatican won the Economics prize 2004 for ‘outsourcing’ prayers to India.
The Ig Nobel in Mathematics 2002 went to K.P. Sreekumar and the late G. Nirmalan of Kerala Agricultural University, India, for their analytical report "Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants."
The Ig Nobel 2001 for Public Health went to Chittaranjan Andrade and B.S. Srihari of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India, for their probing medical discovery that nose picking is a common activity among adolescents.
In 1998, the Ig Nobel prize for Peace went to Prime Minister Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan, for their aggressively peaceful explosions of atomic bombs.
The 1998 Ig Nobel for physics went to Deepak Chopra of The Chopra Center for Well Being, La Jolla, California, for his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness.
Ravi Batra of Southern Methodist University, shrewd economist and best-selling author of "The Great Depression of 1990" ($17.95) and "Surviving the Great Depression of 1990" ($18.95), for selling enough copies of his books to single-handedly prevent worldwide economic collapse won the Ig Nobel in Economics in 1993.

Clearly, Indians are blazing a trail everywhere. Summing up, as the awards ceremony traditionally is:
"If you didn't win a prize — and especially if you did — better luck next year!"

Written for NERD magazine in October 2008. This was published.