Says the video’s maker:
“What if I told you that a physicist earned a major award for magnetically levitating a frog, what would you think? It really happened and this story can only refer us to a central question in today’s scientific debate: is there scientific research that is useless? Today we are talking about the famous Ig Nobel Prize – a play on words between the oldest and most serious Nobel and the word ignoble – which assigns ten awards, without any monetary contribution, to “strange, funny and even absurd” research. Animated by that American pragmatism, at times so effective, direct and at the same time ironic, the organizers thought of an event that, while making people smile at first, could also make people reflect and spread science and its value. An event that intends to reward the unusual, the imaginative, and stimulate the interest of the general public in science. Studies that appear bizarre, useless or even ridiculous can instead prove to be important, they can generate entire fields of research, they can favor progress through unpredictable mechanisms. History is full of examples capable of supporting this thesis, but the Ig Nobel are able to prove it to us with a smile. They spread a form of disclosure, ironic and very powerful, which should be more practiced to mend that dangerous laceration that dangerously separates, today more than ever, the scientific community and society.”