The Ig Nobel Prize ceremony returns to MIT for the first time in 20 years
The ceremony returns to in-person activities after being held online for four years
Photo Courtesy of Anson So
Photo Courtesy of Anson So
On Sept. 12, the 34th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony took place at MIT’s 10-250 lecture hall. Founded in 1991 by Marc Abrahams, the Ig Nobel Prize awards unusual and humorous scientific research that “first make people laugh, then make them think.” The 34th annual ceremony awarded ten prizes across a diverse range of topics, from the efficacy of fake medicine to mammals that breathe through their anuses. The theme of this year’s ceremony is Murphy’s Law, a saying that if something can go wrong, then it will go wrong.
The 2024 ceremony marks the return of the Ig Nobel Prize back to MIT, the original site of the ceremony. The ceremony was organized in collaboration with the MIT Press and MIT Museum. From 1991 to 1994, the Ig Nobel Prizes was held in MIT, but then moved to Sanders Theatre at Harvard University from 1995 to 2019. The ceremonies were online from 2020 to 2023 due to the COVID pandemic, making this year’s ceremony the first in-person ceremony since 2019.
The six presenters for the Ig Nobel Prize were the following Nobel Prize laureates: Abhijit Banerjee, Moungi Bawendi, Esther Duflo, Jerome Friedman, Eric Maskin, and Robert Merton.
Besides introducing the winner’s work and presenting the awards to the winners, the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony has many comedic traditions, including the mini-opera and 24/7 lectures. Called “The International Murphy’s Law Song Competition Contest Opera,” the mini-opera featured four contestants who sang funny songs about Murphy’s Law, and all of their performances followed Murphy’s Law. On the other hand, the 24/7 lectures had speakers like Professor Esther Duflo explain their topic in 24 seconds, followed by a summary in 7 words.
The Anatomy Prize winners, Dr. Marjolaine Willems and Dr. Roman Hossein, presented their research on whether the Earth’s hemisphere plays a role in the direction of hair whorls. From their study on twins in France and Chile, they found that counterclockwise whorls were more common in the Southern hemisphere. In an interview with The Tech, Dr. Hossein said that “it was great to be recognized for something.” Dr. Hossein doesn’t expect further funding, but quipped that “I can convince students to work under me” because the project received the Ig Nobel Prize.
Physics Prize recipient Professor James (“Jimmy”) C. Liao brought a toy fish as a prop for his amusing speech about his research on the swimming abilities of a dead trout. Liao’s research on this unconventional topic was for his biology PhD thesis at Harvard 20 years ago. Contrary to what one may expect, Liao found that the eddies and fluid movement in water were sufficient for a dead fish to mimic the swimming motions in living fish.
Liao acknowledges that his research may appear “ridiculous on the surface.” Despite this, he believes that his research is significant because of its insights on how fish harvest energy for passive propulsion activity. “Water swims the fish! Viva la fish!” Liao yelled, waving the fish prop high in the air. His humorous presentation elicited lots of chuckles from the audience.
Meanwhile, Probability Prize laureates František Bartoš and Eric-Jan Wagenmakers demonstrated that doing a coin flip experiment 350,757 times supports the theory that a coin tends to land on the same side as it started. What inspired the team to perform this experiment was coming across a paper by Diaconis, Holmes, and Montgomery (2007). The paper found that a coin is more likely to land on the same side it started according to physics-based modeling. These findings motivated the team to verify that the paper’s theory regarding a coin toss’s bias was indeed correct.
To encourage students to participate in this study, Wagenmaker told them that they would become part of the “largest, most comprehensive data set” for coin tossing. The data collection process took the team a total of 680 working hours, which is the equivalent of 85 working hours.
The last awardees were Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen, posthumous recipients of the Biology Prize. Matt Wells and Jane Wells, grandson and daughter of Fordyce Ely, were present at the ceremony to accept the prize. The presentation was amusing for its reenactment of the research’s experiment that involved an exploding bag next to a cat on top of a cow to study its effect on milk injection in cows, causing the audience to roar with laughter.
Per tradition, the ceremony ended with its iconic paper airplane deluge, a fun moment in which audience members threw paper airplanes at a person with a bullseye suit in the center of the stage. The ceremony closed off with a big round of applause from the packed audience.
A companion event called the “Ig Nobel Face-to-Face” happened on Sept. 14 in the MIT Museum. Free with museum admission, the event had new Ig Nobel Prize winners ask each other questions about their research and answer questions from the audience.
A video webcast of the ceremony can be found on YouTube.