8 October 2002

IG NOBEL AWARDS SHOW 'HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE'

Copyright Carol Cruzan Morton, Globe Correspondent

Here is more evidence why scientists are, well, different from the rest of us.

When presented with a foamy pint at a local pub, Arnd Leike, a high-energy physicist at the University of Munich, took out a ruler and a stop watch and measured the height of his suds every 15 seconds.

For his resulting paper on the exponential decay of beer froth published in the January 2002 issue of the European Journal of Physics, Leike was presented with the physics prize at this year's Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, the goofy annual awards of the science humor magazine, Annals of Improbable Research. "You can repeat the measurements," Leike told the cheering crowd of 1,200 at Harvard University's Sanders Theater in Cambridge Thursday night. "There is a lot of work to be done."

For a dozen years, the ceremony has recognized the silly side of science, giving awards to researchers who study the dangers of reading textbooks highlighted by idiots or complete comprehensive surveys of belly-button lint.

"Every winner has done something that first makes people laugh and then makes them think," said Marc Abrahams, Annals editor and master of ceremonies. "The achievements speak for themselves, all too eloquently."

Charles Paxton accepted the biology prize on behalf of his coauthors for "Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches Towards Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain," published in the journal, British Poultry Science. "For too long, science has held its collective head in the sand on this particular issue," Paxton said.

Theo Gray of Wolfram Research grabbed the chemistry prize for gathering many elements of the periodic table and assembling them into the form of an actual four-legged, 200-pound conference table (see periodic tabletable.com).

The peace prize was awarded to four Japanese scientists and businessmen for promoting harmony between the species by inventing Bow-Lingual, a computer-based automatic dog-to-human language translation device.

Several winners were unable - or unwilling - to accept their prizes in person. K.P. Sreekumar and the late G. Nirmalan of Kerala Agricultural University in India, won the mathematics prize for their analytical report, "Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants." Eduardo Segura of Spain won the hygiene award for inventing a washing machine for cats and dogs. The economics prize went to the executives, corporate directors and auditors of Enron, Adelphia, Global Crossing, Qwest Communications, Tyco, WorldCom and 21 other companies for adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world.

The awards appear to mock science, but they actually celebrate the unconstrained creative mind, the joy of intellectual inquiry and discovery, and the scientific process. One or two awards each year ridicule people who seem to misuse, misjudge or misinterpret the results of science. And through it all, scientists and their professional idiosyncrasies are mercilessly teased.

"This pokes fun at scientists who take science and themselves too seriously," said Richard Roberts, a 1993 Nobel Prize winner in physiology and medicine who handed out several of the awards. "This shows the human side of science."

-ccm-