The Ig Nobel Prizes honour research that “first makes people laugh, then makes them think” — studies on whether cows named individually give more milk, or how quickly a wombat produces cube-shaped droppings. For 35 years the ceremony has been an American institution, held every September shortly before the real Nobels, with laureates flying in to accept their awards under a hail of paper aeroplanes thrown by the audience. This year, for the first time, it will not happen in the United States.
What is changing
The 36th ceremony, organised by the digital magazine Annals of Improbable Research, will be held in Zurich, Switzerland, in partnership with the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). Organisers say the event will return to Zurich every second year, with other European cities hosting in between.
Why
The stated reason is blunt. Marc Abrahams, the magazine’s editor and the ceremony’s master of ceremonies, told The Guardian that over the past year travelling to the US had become unsafe for the event’s guests, and that the organisers could not in good conscience invite this year’s winners or international journalists to make the trip. The problem is practical as much as political: growing difficulty and uncertainty in obtaining US visas for foreign visitors. The trend was already visible last year, when four of the ten laureates did not come to Boston for the main ceremony.
Why a joke prize matters
The Ig Nobels are a joke with a serious audience. Winners are frequently well-regarded scientists whose odd-sounding work turns out to be useful — the 2006 physics prize for why dry spaghetti snaps into more than two pieces is a standard illustration of fracture mechanics. The ceremony draws researchers and journalists from dozens of countries, which is exactly the kind of gathering that visa friction hurts first. When even a comic science event decides it cannot reliably bring its participants into a country, the signal to conference organisers everywhere is hard to miss.
The wider pattern
Scientific conferences have been quietly relocating for a while, choosing venues where attendees from Asia, Africa and the Middle East can actually get in. For researchers in Bangladesh, who routinely lose weeks to visa appointments and occasionally lose the trip entirely, a Europe-based Ig Nobel is, if anything, slightly easier to reach — Schengen visas remain a hurdle, but a more predictable one. Whether the move is temporary or the beginning of a permanent European home, the organisers have made the point that the paper aeroplanes will fly wherever the scientists can.
