Ig Nobel Prize Watch Party Planned for Sept. 12 in Owen Library

The 34th annual unveiling of the Ig Nobel Prizes takes place on Thursday, Sept. 12, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and via webcast. To celebrate locally, Owen Science and Engineering Library is hosting a watch party from 3-5 p.m. on the second floor. The party is free and open to the public, and light refreshments will be available.

After four years of being shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the ceremony happened only online, this year’s event will be in person, where audience members can participate in the 2024 Paper Airplane Deluge among other traditions.

“The awards make space to acknowledge excellent science that may be overlooked for other prizes because it appears too undignified or absurd,” said Science Librarian Emily Cukier. “They also give scientists a rare opportunity to speak truth to power via irony—like the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize in Economics awarded to the Enron Corp. for the use of imaginary numbers in the business world.”

The prizes started in 1991 to recognize research achievements that make people laugh, then make them think, according to the Ig Nobel Prize website. They are named after Ignatius “Ig” Nobel, a distant (fictitious) cousin of Nobel Prize founder Alfred. The name is also a pun on the word “ignoble,” meaning of low birth or common origin.

To learn more about the prizes, see last year’s WSU Libraries’ article with Cukier.