The Ig Nobel Prizes are a parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early October — around the time the recipients of the genuine Nobel Prizes are announced — for ten achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” Organized by the scientific humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), they are presented by a group that includes genuine Nobel Laureates at a ceremony at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater.
For 2008, Physics Ig Nobel goes to:
Dorian Raymer and Douglas Smith, for proving that a heap of string will inevitably tangle.
Spontaneous knotting of an agitated string
They showed that if you take a heap of string, put it in a box and tumble the box, the string will get tangled up.
They also performed a topological analysis
In the end they showed that : the longer the string, the more likely it is to form a knot. String that was 1.5 feet or shorter never got tangled up. But “as the string gets longer, the probability of a knot forming goes up and up,” Smith says, at least to 18 feet. Flexibility matters, too. The more pliable the string, the more likely it is to knot spontaneously.
Congratulation to Smith and Raymer
Here are the other winners of the 2008 Ig Noble. - most notable one is the Chemistry Prize.
* Archaeology: Astolfo Gomes de Mello Araujo and Jose Carlos Marcelino, for showing that armadillos can mix up the contents of an archaeological site.
* Biology: Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert, and Michel Franc, for discovering that fleas that live on dogs jump higher than fleas that live on cats.
* Chemistry: Sheree Umpierre, Joseph Hill, and Deborah Anderson, for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide and C. Hong, C.C. Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang for proving it is not.
* Cognitive science: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Hiroyasu Yamada, Ryo Kobayashi, Atsushi Tero, Akio Ishiguro, and Ágota Tóth, for discovering that slime molds can solve puzzles.
* Economics: Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tyber, and Brent Jordan, for discovering that exotic dancers earn more when at peak fertility.
* Literature: David Sims, for his study “You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations”
* Medicine: Dan Ariely for demonstrating that expensive counterfeit drugs are more effective than inexpensive counterfeit drugs.
* Nutrition: Massimiliano Zampini and Charles Spence, for demonstrating that food tastes better when it sounds more appealing
* Peace: The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology and the citizens of Switzerland, for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity.
