Marc Abrahams at the 21st annual Ig Nobel awards ceremony at Harvard University in 2011 (Image: Michael Dwyer/AP/Press Association Images)Marc Abrahams is an evangelist for science with a sense of humor. Founder of The Annals of Improbable Research and the accompanying Ig Nobel prizes, his new book is called This is Improbable: Cheese string theory, magnetic chickens, and other WTF research. He has spent the last 23 years looking for research that makes people laugh - and then makes them think.
This is Improbable is your fourth book, if I'm counting correctly. Why write it now?
Too much material. It comes largely from some of the stuff I've been writing in the newspaper column [in The Guardian] over the past nine years. Some are things I've learned about from some of the Ig Nobel winners. Some of the winners have really become part of the family. From them and from other people, every day there's a big flow of information and commentary. I'm always looking for stuff and trawling around, but some days the flow becomes, I say this cheerfully, almost overwhelming in volume.
How did you get into this business in the first place?
I used to be doing software stuff. I started a software company. But I've always done stuff a little bit like this, even when I was a little kid.
This chunk of my career, life, whatever, started when I wondered whether some of this stuff that I'd been writing, whether I might get it published somewhere. I sent a little pile of it off to a magazine [The Journal of Irreproducible Results]. I got a phone call from somebody saying, I got your articles, and I was wondering if you'd like to be the editor of the journal.
You'd sent them in blind?
I hadn't even seen a copy of the magazine. It was an old magazine. It turned out to have a long, really tangled, crazy history. It started with a couple of scientists in Israel in the 1950s. But by the time I got to it, it was in such bad shape that anybody could improve it.
So I found the original guys, a couple more, and we started the Ig Nobel ceremonies. All kinds of good things started happening.
Then the company publishing it got a new president who decided he wanted to kill off a lot of their publications. So after a few years, rather than watching the thing disappear, I invited everyone who'd ever been involved to start a new thing, with a new name. And the guy who came up with the name of the original, I made sure he got to name the new one.
In the early days, how did you find the studies you covered?
There was still a bunch of people who knew of the previous journal. There was a gang of people who had been doing this stuff and had no place to send it. As time went on it became easier and easier. There's so much stuff out there. So much stuff. And some of it has this quality we look for: it makes you laugh, and then makes you think. It sticks in your head. And a week later it's all you want to talk about.
How do you choose the research that features in The Annals of Improbable Research?
With great difficulty. I could live off the pile I have now for 10 or 20 years. But it also means that as time goes on I get to be choosier and choosier.
The Ig Nobel prizes at this point have 9000 new nominations per year, and 10 winners. And pretty consistently, 10 to 20 per cent is people nominating their own stuff. Those almost never win. The funny thing about the Ig Nobel prize is that quality is almost always a side effect. It's difficult to hit that quality if that's the main thing you're trying to do. Often there's something that strikes you as amusing, and it is. But when you go and talk to the person who did it, you realise that this conversation you're having is the first time they've realised they did something funny.
Can you give me an example of that?
The physics prize one year went to a group of scientists in Australia. They had published a paper titled: "An analysis of the forces required to drag sheep across various surfaces."
[Laughs]
Almost everyone in the world reacts exactly like you did. But these people, it's just what they were doing. They live in a part of Australia where sheep was a major industry. The people who work with sheep have to bring thousands of them through a big building to shear them. It's a complicated and dangerous process, the sheep often don't want to move where you want them to when you want them to. There were a lot of injuries to the people who use the equipment, as well as the sheep.
The managers were always looking for ways to make it happen more smoothly and less dangerously. So they called in these scientists and asked, is there anything you can do? The scientists went to work, and this was their report.
But the moment it was pointed out, they immediately thought it was funny.
Now that the Igs are 20 or so years old, they're kind of venerable and respected. How does that make you feel?
I hope it's not too well respected. I wish it were better known. If you were to go out on the street, probably even right here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and asked the first person you met if they know what the Ig Nobel prize is, most people don't know.
In the last few years I've really come to believe that if this were happening in another country, it would be better known. There's always so much more interest in England and in other countries than here.
Someone I was on a panel with about a year ago put into words what's different about how science is treated in the US: science here is earnest. It's important, and deeply serious. It's not funny. That's just not the main way of looking at it here. But it is in other places.
I think it gets at this main word - "improbable". What you're really saying is, it's not what you're expecting. If something is truly, utterly unexpected to you, your first reaction is to laugh. Even something tragic. But once you know about it, it's not funny anymore. That's what was happening with the sheep dragging. That happens with every scientist, and with everybody.
That's a lot of what I do: take the stuff that to most people is not worth looking at, but if you look from a different angle and give it a little time, it makes it really unexpected and interesting.
Listen to Marc discuss his favourite Ig Nobel moments here:
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