Ig Awards Put New Spin on Physics
By NICK MCCREA; OF THE NEWS STAFF
ORONO – Physics actually can be funny. How can it not be when “An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces,” is published in a journal?
Marc Abrahams revealed this and many other odd scientific studies that have been featured in his magazine to a joint meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers and the American Physical Society at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Best Western Black Bear Inn.
Abrahams’ journal, the Annals of Improbable Research, is “really about one simple idea,” Abrahams said, “things that first make people laugh and then make them think. That’s it.”
The magazine awards 10 Ig Nobel Prizes each year, which receive worldwide attention. Past winners have ranged from a scientist who in 1991 proved water’s “intelligence,” to a group of mathematicians who determined in 2006 the average number of pictures a person needs to take to be sure that no one in the photograph has their eyes closed. The answer depends on the number of people in the picture and on the quality of the light where the photo is being taken.
On Friday, the roomful of physicists and professors laughed to the point of tears as Abrahams showed slide after slide on his PowerPoint presentation about unusual studies like these.
Each year, about 6,000 people are nominated – most of them by foreign governments or the nominees’ own companies – for Ig Nobel prizes.
“We don’t understand it, but we’re sort of pleased,” Abrahams said.
The seven researchers who studied the forces required for sheep pulling were astonished when they learned they had been selected to win an award.
“It was the first moment that any of them thought that what they’d done might be considered funny,” Abrahams said. Some of the studies are taken seriously by those who research them.
“Don’t take an Ig Nobel Prize as a knock on someone,” Abrahams said. “It’s all in how you look at it.”
Winners receive the prize itself which is handmade from “extremely cheap materials” – a piece of paper saying that they won and an invitation to the popular awards ceremony at Harvard University. Winners, however, have to pay their own way because the journal takes in little income.
The Annals of Improbable Research accepts studies from anyone who has something unusual to share. The journal has published a 7-year- old’s article in the same issue as one written by a Nobel Prize winner.
Both were about equal in quality, Abrahams joked.
For more information on the Annals of Improbable Research or the Ig Nobel Prizes, visit www.improbable.com.
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