Author: Erin Pallott

You might have heard of parody award ceremonies before, such as the Golden Raspberry Awards which mock the Academy Awards. But did you know of the annual award ceremony which satirises the most prestigious scientific award: The Nobel Prize?

The 32^nd First Annual Ig Nobel Ceremony was held on 15^th September and I wanted to take the opportunity to introduce them to anyone who hadn’t previously heard of them and explain why I think they’re an important lesson in science communication.

The Ig Nobel Prizes have been awarded annually since their founding in 1991 by Marc Abrahams. He is a co-founder of Annals of Improbable Research, a satirical science magazine, and the former editor-in-chief of the similar Journal of Irreproducible Results. For over 30 years, Marc Abrahams has made incredible contributions to science communication through his hilarious writing and talks. Since creating the award ceremony to celebrate the funny and baffling side of research, he has hosted it every single year and writes much of the content. His 2014 TED talk below explains why he created these awards.

Early awards were sometimes given to criticise pseudoscience and trivial research, but now follow the theme of “science that makes people laugh, and then think”. Some of my favourite prizes which I think neatly summarise the tone of the awards include:

• 2017 Physics prize for proving cats are, in fact, liquid.
• 1996 Physics prize for studies on Murphy’s Law and toast usually landing butter side down.
• 2014 Physics prize for investigating friction forces involved in stepping on a banana peel.
• 2001 Technology prize for reinventing the wheel.

The ceremony itself is light-hearted, full of running gags which make fun of aspects of events that people tend to find… boring. Instead of a lengthy opening talk, we are greeted with the ‘Welcome, Welcome’ speech every year which consists only of the brilliantly brief “welcome, welcome”. Each year, various strange visual gag awards are handed out by Nobel Laureates. You can watch this year’s ceremony here.

My favourite recurring feature, which I believe should be implemented at all talks and conferences, is “Miss Sweetie Poo”, a child who will shout over any overrunning speakers about how bored she is until they leave the stage. For the past few years, the ceremony has been held online, so they left it to other speakers to regulate each other’s timekeeping by making as much noise as possible when the time is up. I imagine this is something many reading this have always wanted to do.

Jokes aside, I think the Ig Nobel prizes and its organisers are champions of science communication. The ceremonies themselves are freely accessible, live-streamed and uploaded to YouTube. Informal lectures by the winners are also uploaded. Besides physical accessibility, language can also form a major barrier to public engagement. This year’s acceptance speeches were fantastically clear, concise, and engaging. They also host a “24/7” series, inviting speakers to explain what they are working on in 24 seconds, and then just 7 words. Overuse of specialist language in scientific literature is already a barrier to other researchers and becomes even more confusing to the public trying to seek out evidence-based material.

Accessibility of language is very relevant in this year’s ceremony, as the literature prize was awarded to a group “for analyzing what makes legal documents unnecessarily difficult to understand”. The work of Eric Martínez and colleagues looked at those legal contracts (e.g. terms of service) that we come into contact with so often in daily life and concluded that the reason they are so hard to understand is largely a result of poor writing and not a lack of knowledge by the reader. Previous studies have also found similar results with other science texts. It is important to keep in mind when communicating our research to not only consider specialist language, but also general readability.

The Ig Nobel Prizes celebrate the weird and wonderful but research recognised by these ceremonies is not at all insignificant. The work of these researchers provides evidence to change wider society and has certainly led to further breakthroughs. Marc Abraham’s 2014 TED talk mentioned above gives some insight into how much value seemingly trivial research can have.

My chosen example, and how this is relevant to The University of Manchester, is the work by Regius Professor, Sir Andre Geim. Along with Sir Michael Berry, he received the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize for levitating a frog using magnets. Earlier this year, it was reported that a new research facility in China, inspired by the great floating frog, is using magnetism to simulate the moon’s gravity on Earth. Sir Andre Geim also received a Nobel Prize in physics (the real one) in 2010, for experiments on the ground-breaking 2D material, graphene. At the time of writing, Sir Geim is still the only person to receive a Nobel and Ig Nobel Prize, which is technically more prestigious than having two Nobel Prizes.

Accessible and light-hearted, the Ig Nobel prizes set a shining example of science communication. As well as the features already mentioned, they show the importance of not taking ourselves too seriously.