A noble side to Ig Nobels On Thursday, a select band of scientists will find themselves in the media spotlight as the latest winners of a prize for discoveries celebrated the world over. No, not the Nobel Prize, which is increasingly awarded for advances that barely anyone apart from the winners can understand. When it comes to making headlines, that most prestigious of prizes now routinely loses out to the far more entertaining and accessible Ig Nobel prizes given for research which “First makes people laugh and then makes them think”….
Some of the scientists who find themselves awarded Igs on Thursday might prefer to have won the “real” thing. They might even worry about being looked down upon by their peers. Yet whether it is the spinning of a plate or the tangling of DNA, the truth is that nature herself doesn’t understand the meaning of “trivial”…
So writes Robert Matthews in The National newspaper, on September 26, 2009. He himself was awarded the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics for his studies of Murphy’s Law, and especially for demonstrating that toast often falls on the buttered side.