The shower curtain sucks into the shower because of low pressure on the inside and high pressure on the outside. If this year's winners are any indication, it's probably just as hard to win an Ig Nobel prize as it is to win a bona fide Nobel.
Contrary to what you might believe, the ten new winners of the Ig -- a send-up of the Nobel, giving prizes to people whose achievements "cannot or should not be reproduced" -- aren't on a lower rung of the genius ladder than, say, those mussy-haired physicists who dabble in relativity. They just think a little differently, they say.
Indeed, some of the new Ig Nobel laureates, who were honored at a ceremony on Thursday evening at Harvard University, solved a few of the most vexing questions of our time. For example, why does a shower curtain billow inwards when the shower is on?
Earlier this year, the shower curtain mystery was tackled by David Schmidt, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Massachusetts -- and for his work, he won the Ig Nobel in physics.
Schmidt said that the problem seems simpler than it is, and that most of the people who had attempted to answer the question -- apparently, this is an old problem -- had only provided theories. Schmidt, however, is an expert on sprays: shower sprays, fuel injector sprays, that kind of thing. A fluid is forced out of a small opening and thrust into the unpredictable world, and it's David Schmidt's job to somehow predict it.
"I realized that they were all weighing in with their opinions," he said, "and with these computer simulations I was doing" -- for his serious research -- "I had something at my fingertips that I could use to answer it."
After two weeks of number crunching using a spray simulator that only he has, Schmidt discovered the answer. It wasn't very stunning, but it was still a provable answer -- one which nobody else could produce.
"Basically, a vortex sets up," he said. "It's like a hurricane (of air) turned on its side, and in the center of that is low pressure, and that pulls in near the middle of the curtain. But because of the way tension works in a curtain you get the bottom moving in."
He stressed that this was just a fun project, and that he wasn't using taxpayers' money to conduct the research. But he said that it was still a thrill to get this award, because "it's a huge boost for the university, and the department."
He said that many young people don't know that science can be this fun, and that he plans to use his research to tell them otherwise. He's scheduled to speak at three high schools over the next few months.
Indeed, the other Ig laureates also said they were thrilled about the honor, because it's a great benefit to their field.
"I'm really proud of this -- I think it's neat," said Lawrence Sherman, a psychologist at Miami University, Ohio, who won a Psychology Ig for his influential research report, "An Ecological Study of Glee in Small Groups of Preschool Children."
Sherman wrote the paper after observing pre-school kids in the mid-1970s and noticing that sometimes, for no apparent reason, kids would get incredibly happy. "It was not an individual phenomenon, it was a social phenomenon," he said.
Sherman is, himself, filled with glee about the award, and -- from the sound of it -- most of the time. He's a former president of the International Society for Humor Studies, and he's also the vice president of the Ohio Gourd Society. This weekend, in fact, he's off to the world's largest gourd festival.
"Awards are good," he said. "So is humor."
Picking a Winner: an Ig Nobel Job
Picking a Winner: an Ig Nobel Job
A Gala Night for Weird Science
A Gala Night for Weird Science
