Why are you laughing? What about we doing science?

One person has single-handedly developed an award for the broadest strata of the population for twenty years, and has developed it from a regional to a global one, from the self-promotion of a group of Frankensteins in a small auditorium. Nowadays, with the millions of live broadcasts on YouTube, Mark 61 Abrahams can completely ask future generations to inscribe the following words on his tombstone a hundred years later: I am a not noble, but pure person; People who are free from vulgar taste but who are beneficial to the people. This book, one of the series of Ig Nobel Prize records written by him, "Why Are You Smiling? We Are About Science" came out at just the right time, as it coincided with the awarding of this year's award, and it was also a coincidence. However, on September 21, not long ago, the Ig Nobel Prize continued to be awarded in a serious manner at Harvard’s Sanders Theater on the other side of the earth. Scientists from all over the world, big-name and not, gathered together and moved out ten trophies. Let me review some of the most popular awards this year: Psychology Award: Anita Eerland et al. for a study on "Leaning the body to the left makes the Eiffel Tower appear smaller"; Chemistry Award: Johan Pettersson et al. A study on "The hair of residents in a small town in Sweden turns green" conducted by others; Physics Award: A study on "Mechanical Analysis of Ponytail Movements" conducted by Keller and Goldstein et al; Anatomy Award: A study by de Waal et al. on "Chimpanzees can recognize who another familiar chimpanzee is by looking at its buttocks"; Medicine Award: A study by Ben-Soussan and Antonietti on "How to make colonoscopy possible Minimizing the probability of patient explosion" study. Okay, let’s list the above. I don’t need to add any more explanations. I believe you already have a rough idea of ??what the so-called Ig Nobel Prize is. To explain the reason a little bit, it is a ground-level awards event that continues from the scientific humor magazine "Annual Report of Impossible Research". It started in 1991 and is held annually. The official name is Ignoble Nobelprize, or IG Award for short, which literally translates to "Ignoble Nobelprize". Nobel Prize", the Chinese world prefers to call it the "Ig Nobel Prize". So far, Brother Mark Abrahams, who graduated from the Department of Applied Mathematics at Harvard, has personally hosted twenty-two first IG Award ceremony, which is regarded as world-famous; he has written nearly ten books, four of which Related to the IG Award, Guoke Reading Club will successively introduce and launch the Chinese version; his life experience includes such small glories as being in the same class as Bill Gates, but in a sense, his inspiration and influence on future generations are not Inestimable, perhaps not inferior to Gates - because we don’t know that lonely creatures like humans will one day be unable to highlight the dark forest of the universe due to technological limitations and must accept this fact. What can be done to prevent suicide. Except humor. You must know that IG advocates research that "looks funny at first, but is actually thought-provoking" and strives tirelessly for this, even if they are as low as possible. There are "nose picking", "stinky fart prevention", "penis measurement" and so on. The best behavior of making fun of oneself (see Chapters 2, 5, and 7 of "Why are you laughing? We are doing science" respectively) can also be justified by your attitude, and there is no room for contempt. I think there is an ultimate philosophical thought here: let laughter and thinking be concentrated on people, rather than entrusted to God. With such courage, he is already so awesome. Furthermore, to deal with the nihility of life, the way of "both solemn and harmonious" requires physical practice. The classical Chinese philosophy of life has played with all the semantic tricks, but in the end it has not been implemented. However, Mr. Ma and others follow Western science. The actual combat exercise that Aoyi did was achieved with great success. I won’t go into details about these practical advantages, otherwise it will be spoilers. As a person who has received scientific training and has been engaged in scientific communication for many years, since I am reviewing this book, I must say a few more words. Although most of the awards awarded by IG have very nonsensical names, they can still be regarded as useful explorations under the paradigm. However, there are also some highly controversial cases that require clear rebuttal. For example, "Laughter" contains an article "Water has memory and can spread" that won the IG Chemistry Award in 1991. In fact, it is quite suspected of pseudoscience, and the researcher, Frenchman Jacques Benvennis, was expelled from France because of this. It is not unfair that science is the same body.

Here I explain why this seemingly loving work must be severely resisted. This is because similar research projects are actually looking for a theoretical basis for "homeopathy" derived from Western folk medicine. Advocates of the modern version of homeopathy believe that the molecular structure of water will leave information characteristics of germs and other microorganisms. The most exaggerated is that some people use pure water as a template to copy DNA, which is no less absurd than some Chinese people. Ke claims that distant mysterious electric fields can be used to observe the meridian acupoints claimed by traditional Chinese medicine. By the way, there is a book called "Water Knows the Answer" which is actually a spiritual inspiration that has nothing to do with science. The book "Why Are You Laughing" also contains some research on "mini ancient creatures" and "alien astronauts", which will become jokes over time. Looking at the IG Awards in the past ten years, this kind of mistake has basically never happened again, which shows that it is also quietly advancing with the times. This article has been published in the October 2012 issue of "People" magazine