A Hypercubic Appraisal of This Year’s Ig Nobel Prizes

The Hypercubic blog has a thoughtful essay about this year’s Ig Nobel Prizes and ceremony. (The essay is in Portuguese—if you don’t read the language easily, you might enjoy reading it via a machine translation program). It begins [here in translation]:

IgNobel 2020: the most unlikely polls of the year

TRADITION IS A KNIFE OF TWO VEGETABLES : on the one hand, it is legal to carry on the habits and customs of previous generations; on the other hand, a tradition can easily become a bond, a paralyzing force, ready to trap us in a past that no longer exists or has never existed. Creative people, like scientists and artists, tend to have little reverence for established traditions. This does not mean that there are no traditions in these areas.

An irreverent tradition of the scientific community, for example, is the IgNobel Award. Dedicated to disseminating research that first makes you laugh, then think, IgNobel has traditionally been held in mid-September since 1990. The 30th . The first edition, therefore, would be a good reason to fill the stage, the auditorium and the galleries of the Sanders Theater, in Harvard, last Thursday (17/09). However, for the first time, this traditional location could not be the setting for the most unceremonious ceremony in the scientific community.

The IgNobel committee may be cute, but it is not stupid. Given the extraordinary conditions of a year as buggy as 2020, it would be impossible to bring together about a thousand fans and scientists in a closed environment and without social distance like a theater. Thus, IgNobel left behind one tradition and resorted to another…