The scalper on the steps of Harvard University's Sanders Theatre had no trouble getting rid of his last pair of tickets. Inside, the 1200-seat auditorium was packed to its gothic rafters for the Seventh First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, a celebration of scientific achievements that "cannot or should not be reproduced." The awards ceremony, which founder and emcee Marc Abrahams describes as a "cross between the Academy Awards, the Nobel Prizes, and a Ringling Brothers three-ring circus," is sponsored by the Annals of Improbable Research, which Abrahams edits. It acknowledged (somehow, "honored" would not be the right word) the accomplishments of such diverse luminaries as the late Bernard Vonnegut (Meteorology), perpetrator of a paper entitled "Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Speed," Mark Hostetler (Entomology), author of That Gunk on Your Car: A Unique Guide to the Insects of North America, and notorious Internet spammer Sanford Wallace (Communications), president of Cyber Promotions.
The goal of the Igs is to make science more accessible, according to Eric Schulman, a researcher at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, who delivered a two-minute oral history of the universe at the event. "It's a great time, because it totally contradicts the notion that scientists are stuffy people," Schulman said. "And it shows that if you make science humorous, you can get the average person interested in understanding it."
Few average people were in attendance Thursday night. The audience was filled with the Ig's traditional delegations - groups like "The Society for the Prevention of a Better Tomorrow" and "Non-Extremists for Moderate Change." One representative of "Lawyers For and Against the Big Bang" carried a placard that read, "Have you been injured by cosmic background radiation left behind by the big bang?" On the dais were a handful of actual Nobel Prize winners, including Richard Roberts (Medicine, 1993), wearing a giant yellow and black Cat in the Hat-style stovepipe hat, and William Lipscomb (Chemistry, 1976), who wore a flashing red bow tie and played a few ragtime tunes on his clarinet before the proceedings began.
Highlights of the two-and-a-half hour ceremony, which was cybercast live on the Web and will be broadcast in November on National Public Radio's Science Friday show, included a mini-opera about the creation of the universe entitled Il Kaboom Grosso, an auction of plaster casts of the Nobel laureates' left feet that raised funds for the science programs in Cambridge public schools, and a series of Heisenberg Certainty Lectures. One such lecture, delivered by Boston University chancellor John Silber on the history of free speech, exceeded the strict 30-second time limit, and Silber was forced from the podium by a referee.
Throughout the ceremony, the audience threw hundreds of paper airplanes at the stage, the small orchestra, and each other, a long-time Ig tradition. Confetti and sheet music also flew, as did a replica of the Hale-Bopp comet, which was trailed by a silver spaceship. "The feeling you get when you're there is, 'We shouldn't be allowed to do this,'" says Abrahams.
This year's prize winners include the scientists behind a paper titled "Measuring People's Brainwave Patterns While They Chew Different Flavors of Gum" (Biology), the authors of The Bible Code (Literature), and the creators of the Tamagotchi (Economics). One notable previous Ig winner in attendance was Don Featherstone, the inventor of the plastic pink flamingo (Art, 1996).
The live cybercast was coordinated by Robert T. Morris, the convicted felon whose worm program crashed the Internet in 1988. Doug Berman, the producer of NPR's Car Talk program, was in charge of periodically sweeping the stage clean of paper airplanes. Boston Museum of Science administrator Bunny Watson handled the chickens.
"Sometimes you need to get out of your ivory tower and show that scientists are people too, and we can poke fun at ourselves," said honoree Hostetler, cradling his Ig, a cheap-looking replica of an exploding cigar. During his acceptance speech, Hostetler, a professor at the University of Florida and ardent admirer of all things arthropoidal, thanked "all the Greyhound bus drivers who let me pick the insects off their windshields."
"The initial idea [for the Igs] was to have a goofy awards ceremony," says Abrahams, who has hosted the event since 1991, its first year. "We wanted to get everything we could think of that was dignified and have it appear in some backward, upside-down, or twisted fashion."
Four Nobel laureates dressed in white sheets and impersonating neutrinos for the three-part opera Il Kaboom Grosso certainly satisfied that goal, as did bizarre cameos by the Reverend Peter Gomes of the Harvard Divinity School and a number of (previously) distinguished Harvard professors.
"If there is a serious part to it," muses Abrahams, "it's too see if we can seduce more people to get interested in science - people who think it's scary, or impossible to understand, or just plain boring."
Boring is not a word that can be used to describe a gala at which roving representatives of the Institute for Cryogenic Sex Research handed out pamphlets headlined Safe Sex at Four Kelvin.
