Saturday — The Ig Informal Lectures, at MIT

The Ig Informal Lectures

Saturday, Sept 16, 2017, 1:00 pm

MIT, building 10, room 250 — 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, Planet Earth.

You are invited. It’s free, no tickets needed. Come early to assure a seat.

A half-afternoon of improbably funny, informative, informal, brief public lectures and demonstrations:

The new Ig Nobel Prize winners   have each done something that makes people LAUGH, then THINK. That’s why they were awarded Ig Nobel Prizes. In these lectures, the winners will attempt to explain what they did, and why they did it.
Two past winners will return, to share their adventures:

Thomas Thwaites  (2016 Biology Prize — living as a goat)
John Culvenor  (2003 Physics Prize — Analysis of the forces required to drag sheep across various surfaces)


Everyone will be available for you to talk with, both before and after the lectures.

This video shows TV news anchors’ first reaction to seeing Thomas Thwaites in action:

Here’s a look at one of last year’s lectures — this will give you some of the flavor of this annual event. The 2016 Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, Nathaniel Barr, Derek Koehler, and Jonathan Fugelsang for their scholarly study called “On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit.” (That study was published in the journal Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 10, no. 6, November 2015, pp. 549–563.)

The Ig informal Lectures are a free event, organized in cooperation with the MIT Press Bookstore.