Quirky Scientists Win Ig Nobelity

Australian John Culvenor is seriously serious about shearing sheep — he grew up on a farm, after all, and he has seen workers hurt while wrangling the wooly beasts toward their date with the barber.

By Mark Baard Wired.com

But Culvenor drew only laughs Thursday night when he presented his sheep-shearing safety paper to 1,200 rowdy college kids inside Harvard University’s historic Sanders Theatre.
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Culvenor presented "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep Over Various Surfaces," which he and his colleagues published last year in the journal Applied Ergonomics.

But Culvenor took the abuse well. He knew, after all, he’d be walking away with the physics trophy in this year’s 13th First Annual Ig Nobel Award Ceremony, a raucous send-up of the actual Nobel Prize awards.

This year’s trophy was a solid gold bar, one nanometer long, encased in a clear plastic cube. Culvenor barely had time to utter his thanks for the prize when he was whisked from the stage by a motley crew of costumed pranksters.

Real-life Nobel Prize laureates, including the scientists Wolfgang Ketterle and Richard Roberts, presented this year’s awards amidst the traditional hail of paper airplanes and a burlesque that featured a "nano opera" about a tryst between a beautiful scientist and an oxygen atom.

In keeping with this year’s nano theme, organizers limited winners’ acceptance speeches to 60 seconds. They also insisted on seven-word summaries from each winner — a format the producers of the Academy Awards may want to consider.

The science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research (known also by its descriptive acronym, AIR) presents the Ig Nobels each year to scientists who, for some strange reason, failed to draw mainstream headlines for their research.

The point is not only to have a good time, say the prize winners, but to bring a sense of fun back to science.

"If you can laugh at yourself, and have fun with your work," said Culvenor, "you’ll think more creatively, and probably do a better job. There’s no reason you can’t have a good time, even when you’re looking at a serious problem."

Culvenor, Jack Harvey and their colleagues found that sheep slide across some surfaces more easily than others.

The scientists also discovered that sheep move more quickly when shearers drag the animals downhill. "Not only the shearers, but physicists, too, will be relieved to hear of this finding," said Culvenor.

Other prize winners detailed more bizarre discoveries. C.W. Moeliker, curator of birds at Holland’s Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, took this year’s biology prize for documenting the first recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck. And AIR gave three Stockholm University scientists the interdisciplinary research prize for their unsettling report, "Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans."

AIR editor Marc Abrahams contacts Ig Nobel nominees ahead of time to ensure they won’t be humiliated by the award. (He has been less gracious when giving the award to tobacco companies and other organizations caught lying to the public.)

Most scientists, though, are happy to accept their prizes.

"I told Marc, ‘Are you kidding? I’d kill for one of these things,’" said Theodore Gray, who won the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize for chemistry. Gray won the award for his wooden periodic table, a collection of the names of the elements in the form of a functional wooden table.

Like its more sober cousin, the Nobel, the goofy Ig Nobel can often change the fortunes of its winners. The creators of the Bowlingual dog-to-human language translator, which won the 2002 Ig Nobel Peace Prize (for promoting interspecies understanding), returned this year to thank AIR for making them rich. They also presented each of the Ig Nobel laureates with a Bowlingual toy.

Ig Nobel publicity has changed Gray’s life, too. "I can’t draw a straight line to the publicity, but I’m now getting paid to build displays of the periodic table for museums," said Gray. "I’m also at the center of a group of hobbyists who collect vials containing the elements to complete their own periodic tables."

Gray’s Ig Nobel notoriety also helped him land a job writing a column for Popular Science magazine.

Culvenor is sanguine about his own prospects after winning this year’s physics Ig Nobel. But for now, the sheep-shearing researcher simply plans to give his trophy a place of honor at home in Australia.

"This is one award I’ll never forget," said Culvenor. "Sure, I may also have an actual Nobel award laying around somewhere, but I’d have to check the cupboards."

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