This year’s Nobel Prizes are being currently awarded, and you rightfully may consider them to be a serious affair. However, there is a much more humorous, purposely irreverent, and arguably no less important version of these awards: The Ig Nobel Prizes.

The 2024 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded at a wild and wacky ceremony on September 12, 2024, at MIT university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The 34th annual awards, given out by the editors of the humorous scientific publication ‘Annals of Improbable Research’ to achievements that “first make people laugh and then make them think”.

This year’s ceremony had the theme of Murphy’s Law, and featured Murphy’s Law song contest opera, ‘24/7’ lectures in which experts first explained their subject in 24 seconds, then in seven words, silly costumes and paper-plane throwing.

The much heralded, 2024 winners included:

• Demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout.

• Studying if the direction people’s hair swirls in the southern hemisphere matches that of people in the northern hemisphere.

• Finding evidence that some real plants imitate the shapes of neighboring artificial plastic plants.

You can watch the entire, outlandish ceremony here: https://improbable.com/ig/archive/2024-ceremony/

Fun fact: Sir Andre Geim has the distinct honor of bagging both the Nobel Prize (in 2010 in physics for his work on graphene research) and the Ig Nobel Prize (in 2000 for the magnetic levitation of frogs). Such direct connection between highly valuable and highly ridiculous should not be the least surprising. As Albert Einstein famously said: “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”

#humor #Nobelprize #leadership @creativity @futurism