By Leone Seidel: An Ig Nobel Prize is a prize awarded to the person who did the least useful experiment in a field. There’s an Ig Nobel acoustics prize, an Ig Nobel psychology prize, etc. These ideas are quite interesting and will induce laughter. For example, the 2020 Ig Nobel physics prize was for “Determining, experimentally, what happens to the shape of a living earthworm when one vibrates the earthworm at high frequency.” Citation, Improbable Research.
The Ig Nobel Prize originated in the year 1991. There were only a few topics for the Ig Nobel prize, so there were not many people who had the Ig Nobel Prize, but now, there are 10, compared to 6 in the old days. That’s a big improvement!
Other funny ones, such as the 2020 Ig Nobel peace prize, for “Having their diplomats surreptitiously ring each other’s doorbells in the middle of the night, and then run away before anyone had a chance to answer the door.” Citation, Improbable Research. Honestly, these are quite funny, but they don’t have any application to the real world. Why on earth would someone ring a doorbell and run away as fast as they can!? Absolutely ridiculous.
Any number of people can win an Ig Nobel prize as long as they all collaborate while working on the project the Ig Nobel Prize was awarded to. One person to a whole organization can win the prize.
I imagine that Ig Noble prize would be to set a building on fire while doing an experiment. But no, that never actually happened. The Ig Noble prize only shows successful research, if you can call it research.
I never saw the point of the prize unless if it was entertainment. The experiments are so funny that they feel pointless. I think that they should do one every 3 months! It would keep me entertained all year long.
Another funny one is the 1992 literature prize, for “The 948 scientific papers he is credited with publishing between the years 1981 and 1990, averaging more than one every 3.9 days”. Those papers must not have been very good ones!