Over the past few weeks there have been some amazing things from around the world that received the recognition they truly deserved, as well as some more interesting things which sound hilarious and are being immortalized for other well-deserved reasons. Of course, I am talking about the Nobel and the Ig Nobel Prizes. If you don’t know what the Ig Nobel prizes are, don’t worry, I will get there.
As a brief introduction, the Nobel prizes come from a Swedish inventor named Alfred Nobel in 1895 who, in his will, outlined that he wanted his fortune to be used to award innovators from around the world based on “the greatest benefit to mankind.” These awards were categorized into six different groups; physics, chemistry, physiology, medicine, literature, and peace. Annually, a committee gathers and discusses the contributions made by each applicant, and decides whether or not they are worthy of receiving the incredibly coveted award.
As of now, there are four Nobel prizes that have been published for 2016: the prizes for Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, and Peace. The science awards tend to go into specific details and get complex quickly, far too complicated to attempt an explanation. However, the Peace prize is rather interesting. The Award was given to the Colombian President Juan Manual Santos for his efforts to end a 50-year-long civil war that resulted in 220 000 dead citizens and 6 million people being displaced. The committee did not let his commitment go unnoticed and he was chosen as the best candidate for the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize.
The Nobel prizes are really quite valuable, but as with most things in life, if you make something worth talking about, expect there to be parodies or ridicule; thusly we have the Ig Nobel Prizes. The Ig Nobel prizes aren’t awarded for ‘the greatest benefit to mankind’ but are rather international awards that honour achievements that make people laugh, and then think about it. These are awarded to the unusual and imaginatively unique studies into the “wacky world of science and humanity.”
There are plenty more than just six Ig Nobel prizes since they expand into categories such as Psychology, Perception, Biology, and Reproduction. The ceremony for these awards was held on September 22nd, at Harvard University. There were a total of 10 different teams awarded for their contribution to humour across the academic board. One of my personal favourites was a Psychology prize that entailed a study done by asking 1000 liars how often they lie, then contemplated the validity of the responses themselves. Another incredible winner for the Medicine Prize in which a team of scientists discovered that if you have an itch on the left side of your body, you can relieve it by scratching your right side while looking in a mirror (or vice versa).
Some of the research done by the winners of both the Nobel and Ig Nobel prizes is intriguing and I recommend you take some time to look into it. The two awards contrast one another but they both require teams of people dedicated to a specific goal, even if one is comedy while the other is human betterment. It’s kinda beautiful, isn’t it?
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