The 2011 Ig® Nobel Prize Ceremony & Lectures
All speeches were kept delightfully brief, thanks in part to eight-year-old Miss Sweetie Poo. This short video shows highlights of various Miss Sweetie Poos at previous ceremonies.
The Ukrainian INTER TV network sent a crew to last year's (2010) ceremony. Click on the image to see their report.
The Ceremony
- The winners
- Ceremony Details and Video of the ceremony
- Program (IgBill)
- Supporters
- Who's Who
- Spiffy Poster
- Some press accounts
/ Previous years' details / Press contacts /
The 2011 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony
Thursday, September 29
Sanders Theater, Harvard University
The 21st First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony introduced ten new Ig Nobel Prize winners. The winners traveled to the ceremony, at their own expense, from several continents. The Prizes were handed to them by a group of genuine, genuinely bemused Nobel Laureates, assisted by a large number of assorted Ig personnel, all before a perpetually standing-room only audience. The ceremony included many other delights—see details below. (For the latest Ig Nobel news, see the blog.)
Watch video of the ceremony here!
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Click for a map and directions, or to learn how to pahk your cah near Hahvud Yahd.
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TICKETS for next year's ceremony will go on sale at the Harvard Box Office, about two months prior to the event.]
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Delegations to the Ceremony
If you have five (5) or more tickets to the Ig Nobel ceremony, your group can choose to be an Official Audience Delegation, and thus be officially celebrated during the event. To register as a Delegation, first obtain tickets from the Harvard Box Office. Then register with Grand Panjandrum of the Delegations Louise Sacco: (+1) 781-444-6757. The most colorful delegations will be selected to march gloriously into the theater. The deadline for registering was Friday, September 23.
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Webcast-Watching Parties
There were webcast-watching parties in Philadelphia and many other places. The parties were coordinated by Ig Nobel Global Webcast Party Coordinator Neil Gussman.
What to expect: Imagine every ceremony you have ever had to endure. Loop them all together, at high speed, upside down. Add ten Ig Nobel Prize winners. That's the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. You might enjoy glancing back at last year's ceremony.)
DOWNLOADABLE PROGRAM: Click here or on the image at right to download your very own copy of the IgBill, identical to the ones that will be distributed the night of the ceremony.
Theme: The theme of this year's ceremony (though not necessarily of the individual prizes) was: CHEMISTRY.
In addition to the awarding of the 2011 Ig Nobel Prizes, the ceremony included a variety of momentously inconsequential events. Among them:
- A special tribute to Professor Lipscomb.
- "Chemist in a Coffee Shop"—World premiere of a mini-opera starring Maria Ferrante, Roberta Gilbert, Dr. Thomas Michel, Daniel Rosenberg, and pianist Branden Grimmett, stage-directed/conducted by David Stockton
- Tom Lehrer's "The Elements" performed by Thomas Michel and Rich Roberts
- The Nobel laureates who physically handed the Ig Nobel Prizes
to the new winners:
- Dudley Herschbach (chemistry, 1986)
- Rich Roberts (physiology or medicine, 1993)
- Roy Glauber (physics, 2005)
- Eric Maskin (economics, 2007)
- Peter Diamond (economics, 2010)
- Louis Ignarro, (physiology or medicine, 1998)
- The 24/7 Lectures, in which several of the world's
top thinkers explaind her or his subject twice:
FIRST: a complete technical description in TWENTY-FOUR (24) SECONDS*
AND THEN: a clear summary that anyone can understand, in SEVEN (7) WORDS:- Susan Lindquist. TOPIC: Stress responses
- Donna Nelson. TOPIC: Single-walled carbon nanotubes
- Dudley Herschbach. TOPIC: The OH + NO reaction
- Kate Clancy. TOPIC:
Vaginal pH
- Returning Ig Nobel Prize winners:
- Don Featherstone (1996 art prize, for creating the plastic pink flamingo)
- Dan Meyer (2007 medicine prize, for co-authoring the study "Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects")
- Deborah Anderson (2009 chemistry prize for testing whether Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide)
- Hyuk Ho Kwon (1999 environmental protection prize, for inventing the self-perfuming business suit).
- Pre-pre-show Boston Squeezebox Ensemble chemi-accordion concert in the lobby (began at 6:45 pm), led by Dr. Thomas Michel
- Pre-show Chemico-Musico-Concerto
- Ceremonial band music by Nicholas Carstoiu and The Ig Leaves.
- The Win-a-Date-With-a-Nobel-Laureate Contest
- Karen Hopkin, creator of the Studmuffins of Science Calendar
- Gala Introduction of the Audience Delegations
- All speeches were brief, and thus especially delightful, with assistance from 8-year-old Miss Sweetie Poo.
- The Minordomos (Genevieve Reynolds, Julia Lunetta, Peaco Todd, Julia Rios, Moss Callum, Jenny Gutbezahl, Ben Biggs) made most things run smoothly on stage.
- The V-Chip Monitor, Prominent New York Attorney William J. Maloney, guarded against offensive words, sounds, thoughts, or imaginings.
- The Traditional "Welcome, Welcome" Speech
- The Traditional "Goodbye, Goodbye" Speech
- Other wondrous things
* Time limits to be enforced by Mr. John Barrett, the Ig Nobel Referee
Who's Who: Click on the photo array to see many of the ceremony organizers and participants:
Downloadable poster: Click on the image at right for a downloadable 2011 Ig Nobel Ceremony Poster in spiffy PDF format. The poster is a great way to increase Ig Nobel and bacterial awareness among friends, family, colleagues, neighbors, and complete strangers.
The Ig Informal Lectures
Saturday, Oct 1, 2011, 1:00 pm.
MIT Building 26, Room 100
60 Vassar Street, Cambridge
(Click here for a map and directions)
FREE ADMISSION -- but seating was limited
A half-afternoon of improbably funny, informative, informal, brief public lectures and demonstrations:
- The new Ig Nobel Prize winners attempted to explain what they did, and why they did it. [5 minutes each, plus a few questions & answers with the audience]
- Several few past winners told us about some of their new adventures [2 minutes each]
And everyone was available for you to talk with, both before and after the lectures.
This free event was organized in cooperation with the MIT Press Bookstore.
All Ig Nobel Prizes activities are organized by the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR). The ceremony is co-sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association (HRSFA), the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students (SPS), the Harvard Computer Society, and the book The Man Who Tried to Clone Himself, published by Plume Books, New York, ISBN 0452287723.
The Ig Informal Lectures are co-sponsored by the MIT Press Bookstore.
About the Ceremony:
Annals of Improbable Research editor Marc
Abrahams, (+1) 617-491-4437
Improbable facilitator Katherine Meusey, (+1) 415-609-0837
Annals of Improbable Research European Bureau Chief Kees Moeliker (Rotterdam, The Netherlands, (+31) 6 53778445