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The Ig Nobel Prizes
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The Ig Nobel Prizes Customer Reviews
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Very funny, but a few sad mistakes
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Coming to me after my admiration for The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and Annals of Improbable Research, Ig Nobel Prizes had a willing audience. The criteria for inclusion included a scientific (or as it turned out pseudoscientific) work that made one laugh and then think. The writing, most of the subjects, and the few photos were mostly very funny, and the book can be recommended for that. Several topics were scatological, but OK. Some of the research project titles make one laugh on their own: Booming Voices of Britain, Nose Picking in Adolescents, the Good Lloyd's Shepherds Insure Disaster, Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts, Filter-Equipped Underwear, The Father of Junk E-mail and many more.
Sadly, a little sophomoric arrogance crept in. On p67, in Father of the Bomb, Edward Teller is said to have the biggest contributor to the origin of the atomic bomb. This will be news to PBS, because their series showed Teller as contributing almost nothing, while pushing for the H-bomb before the A-bomb was first built. Teller was assigned to calculate whether the atmosphere would ignite from an A-bomb, and got the correct answer, which had a 50% probability. It is probably as well that the USA obtained an H-bomb, since the USSR had begun before we did. No one could have said in the 1950-1970s whether mutually assured destruction would prevent nuclear war, but it somehow did, saving the USA and others from the cost of a huge standing army to oppose the USSR. Later Teller realized, with advances in technology, that an effective defense system would remove the need for nuclear bombs. Our failure to build one did not stop the Russian Republic from beginning one. His 1986 or so book "Better a Shield than a Sword" gives the rationale and also the best description of the Chernobyl disaster I ever saw.
On p70 Jaques Chirac of France is castigated for carrying out nuclear tests in the Pacific in 1995. As we normally think of France as democratic and responsible, I do not see how there can be an objection. There were no reports of radiation damage to anyone.
Jacques Benveniste was pilloried for research showing that water has a memory. The book erred in claiming that all homeopathic concoctions contained no molecules of supposedly active material. Also, Marc Abrahams was ignorant of a successful repetition of Benveniste's work, and of placebo-controlled trials where homeopathy actually worked (British Medical Journal, 1991;302:316-323;
and my book review: http://www.scientificexploration.org/jse/bookreviews/v17n2.php
Memory was found in high dilutions (10 E-30 g/mL) of lithium chloride in D20 using thermoluminescence (
On p161 Marc Abrahams attributed the worst of the persistent odor of flatus to hydrogen sulfide. I think it is skatole (3-methylindole).
So parts of Ig Nobel Prizes were not funny at all, but most of it was. |
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