The 2007 Ig® Nobel Prize Ceremony and Lectures
The Ceremony (Thursday, October 4)
........Tickets and Audience Delegations
........Recorded video of the ceremony
........The 2007 Winners
........24/7 Lecturers
........Mini-opera
........IgBill and Poster
........Previews: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7)
........The after-party
Ig Informal Lectures (Saturday, October 6)
Previous years
Press contacts
The 2007 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony
Thursday, October 4, 7:30 pm.
Sanders Theater
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
(Click here for a map and directions, here for info about how to pahk your cah near Hahvud Yahd. But please do not use the Gannon method.)
The 17th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony will announce and introduce the ten new Ig Nobel Prize winners. The winners are traveling to the ceremony, at their own expense, from several continents. The Prizes will be handed to them by a group of genuine, genuinely bemused Nobel Laureates, all before a standing-room only audience of 1200 people. Full details and action pictures will appear in the Nov/Dec 2007 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. The ceremony also includes other wonders.
(Click here to see details and video of last year's ceremony.)
TICKETS are available from the Harvard Box Office, at Holyoke Center and online |
| AUDIENCE DELEGATIONS: Audience members who come to the ceremony with a group of six or more people can choose (by registering in advance) to be recognized as an official Delegation. Every delegation will be officially celebrated at the beginning of the Ceremony, and the very most colorful delegations will be chosen to parade ostentatiously into the theater. | TO REGISTER AS A DELEGATION: The registration deadline is Monday, September 24, 2007. |
| WEBCAST: The ceremony will be webcast live, beginning at 7:15 pm U.S. Eastern time, right here. |
Radio: The ceremony will be recorded for later broadcast, on Friday, November 23, the day after Thanksgiving, on National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation/ Science Friday with Ira Flatow."
Theme: Every year, the ceremony has a new theme. (The theme pertains to some of the goings-on at the ceremony, though not necessarily to any of the year's prize-winning achievements). This year's theme: CHICKEN.
Additional highlights : In addition to the awarding of the Prizes, the ceremony will include a variety of momentously inconsequential events. Among them:
- Keynote speech ("Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken") by Doug Zongker, followed by chicken-related Nano-Lectures by three of the world's great thinkers.
- Return appearances by
- 1996 Ig Nobel Art Prize winner Don Featherstone (creator of the plastic pink flamingo).
- 2003 Ig Nobel Biology Prize winner Kees Moeliker (who documented the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck)
- 2005 Ig Nobel Economics Prize winner Gauri Nanda (who invented an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people DO get out of bed)
- 2006 Medicine Prize winner Dr. Francis Fesmire (pioneer in using digital rectal massage to treat intractable hiccups)
- The 24/7 LECTURES, in which several of the world's top thinkers each explained his or her subject twice:
FIRST: a complete technical description in TWENTY-FOUR (24) SECONDS*
AND THEN: a clear summary that anyone can understand, in SEVEN (7) WORDS.
The Lecturers include: - Fariba Houman: Research Ethics
- Massimo Marcone: Food Science
- Jill Lepore: History
- William Lipscomb: Chicken
- "Chicken versus Egg" —World premiere of the mini-opera, starring the mother-daughter singing team Gail Kilkelly and Maggie McNeil.
- The Nobel Laureates who will present the Ig Nobel Prizes to the winners:
- Roy Glauber
- Dudley Herschbach
- Robert Laughlin
- William Lipscomb
- Craig Mello
- and others to be announced
- The WIN-A-DATE-WITH-A-NOBEL-LAUREATE CONTEST
- Karen Hopkin, creator of the Studmuffins of Science Calendar
- Gala Introduction of the Audience Delegations
- All speeches will be brief, and thus especially delightful
- Portions of the ceremony will be simultaneously translated into several languages, in a manner most pleasing.
- The Traditional "Welcome, Welcome" Speech
- The Traditional "Goodbye, Goodbye" Speech
- Other wondrous things.
* Time limits to be enforced by Mr. John Barrett, the Ig Nobel Referee
 | Click on the images for (left) a downloadable PDF of IgBill 2007, the official printed program; or (right) a downloadable 2007 Ig Nobel Ceremony Poster.
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Two days after the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, a related event:
The Ig Informal Lectures
Saturday, Oct 6, 2007, 1:00 pm.
MIT Building 10, Room 250
77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge
(Click here for a map and directions)
FREE ADMISSION -- but seating is limited
A half-afternoon of improbably funny, informative, brief (5 minutes each, plus a few questions & answers with the audience), high-spirited public lectures, in which the new Ig Nobel Prize winners will attempt to explain what they did, and why they did it.
The new winner's talks will be preceded by a talk by Kees Moeliker (Ig Nobel Biology Prize 2003), who will discuss his most recent discoveries.
This free event is organized in cooperation with the MIT Press Bookstore.
All Ig Nobel Prizes activities are organized by the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR). The ceremony is co-sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association (HRSFA), the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students (SPS), the Harvard Computer Society, and the book The Man Who Tried to Clone Himself, published by Plume Books, New York, ISBN 0452287723.
The Ig Informal Lectures are co-sponsored by the MIT Press Bookstore.
About the Ceremony:
Annals of Improbable Research editor Marc Abrahams (+1) 617-491-4437
Improbable admin Lisa Birk
[On October 5, the day of the ceremony, if you can't reach anyone at Improbable Research, please instead call the Harvard News Office, (+1) 617-495-1585]
About the Book:
The Man Who Tried to Clone Himself, published by Plume Books; contact Liz Keenan, (+1) 212-366-2245
| RETURN OF A SWEEPING SUCCESS: Roy Glauber, who for ten years humbly swept paper airplanes on the stage at the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, will be making his second Ig appearance since being awarded a 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics. |  |
In this photo taken at the 1998 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, Professor Glauber serenely sweeps while Nobel Laureates (left to right) Dudley Herschbach, William Lipscomb, and Richard Roberts wear gigantic shoes in tribute to the 1998 Ig Nobel Statistics Prize winners. Nobel Laureate Sheldon Glashow can be seen in the distance at left as he rushes to join his colleagues. [Photo by Eric Workman] (Click on image to enlarge it) |