Translator: David Mammano Auditor: Michele Gianella
Every year, on December 10,
in the concert hall in Stockholm,
the no longer young King of Sweden
gives people tend no longer young
perhaps the most prestigious of existing awards,
or the Nobel Prize.
[The] Nobel Prize will know more or less:
there for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature,
there is also that for peace that is given in Norway,
there is one for the economy, there is the math,
Nobel apparently they were not very nice mathematicians.
How to blame him, by the way!
But the problem is what?
It is that this award I do not I can win, basically.
I looked in the mirror, I said:
look at your actual capabilities, look at your diet,
at that age you will not get there.
So I had to … (Laughter)
I had to think of something new, to another award.
I found it, it’s beautiful, is the Ig Nobel prize,
really exists, is awarded annually
the strangest research, funny and even absurd.
And it’s a really elegant ceremony,
a ceremony in which I am really looking to participate.
This is an article last year in which I and my colleague
We found a match
between the rate of suicide attempts in 28 countries worldwide
and the airing of “Gray’s Anatomy”.
Now … there really match,
we have not invented the data, I invite you to read the study.
Unfortunately, the article inexplicably
It has not attracted the attention it deserved, but fingers crossed.
Now, what we just said: the IgNobel prizes.
The question, though, that I want to do is this:
These prizes are awarded by Harvard,
that is not really the first past the street.
The winners are then brought at MIT in Boston,
Also here a fairly prestigious institute,
and here it is allowed to present their ideas.
The question is:
because Harvard and MIT
lose time, money and a lot of resources
to reward the ten craziest year’s investigation,
to reward people who go to collect the prize
with a toilet seat on his head
or building of the prosthesis to live like capre-
I swear, this was a prize this year.
Now let’s analyze some of these awards,
we try to give us an answer.
These are the herring, you will have recognized,
herring are swimming in counter.
Because herring swim in counter?
Tend because something is attracting all in the same direction.
You take a gadget of “Star Wars”, throw it on the one hand,
all astrophysicists they going in that direction.
If you take the light or food,
herring all move in that direction,
but so they do to defend themselves from predators.
I, large shark, I see a herring single, I’ll take it, I eat it.
If I see so many herring, maybe I think above
because I take it as a whale, a huge fish ball -So, you do.
Now, the point is that we know for a long time
that the herring swim in office, and also because,
but we did not know how they moved in counter.
As they move in counter?
We recently found out: the first herring, Cape Herring,
moves, decides to go to the right
and it makes a fart.
The second herring – I’m not making this up, it works really well –
the second herring perceives sound at high frequencies
the bubbles created in the water,
then he realizes that Cape Herring went right,
she goes to the right, in its turn does his thing and so on.
Herrings move in the counter like this:
Prize for biology in 2004 for having made known
that herrings apparently communicate with flatulence,
technical term but in short, what we are ..
However I do not see the enthusiasm that I wanted,
then we start (Laughter) we move on to another award.
Those of you who keeps dogs, a dog?
Perfect.
Which one of you, in addition to the dog, it has a compass?
Nothing: dogs and bushes are incompatible.
Perfect.
Let pay if a compass,
bring your dog in a meadow
and observe carefully while doing bisognini.
What do you discover?
A beautiful thing, I do not know if any you ever realized:
the 95% of dogs is their own needs by aligning the axis of your body
with the north-south axis.
The 5% that it does not have younger dogs, most anarchists, then over time they line up.
(Laughs)
This thing is the prize for biology 2014
to have carefully documented 5,500 tests
that dogs, when they make their needs.
prefer to align the axis of their body
with Earth’s magnetic field, in the direction north-south.
We knew the bees,
who felt the earth’s magnetic field,
ants; duck; we did not know dogs.
It’s stupid to know?
Mica too, because in reality the dogs we use them for search and rescue,
so when there is a flood or an earthquake,
you lose the signs to figure out where you are, you lose the orientation.
Knowing that the dog knows to point north,
and will always do,
because if you can do it in time of need
I will also do in general,
You could also have its uses.
But if there excites even the dog, we talk about chickens.
What happens to a chicken that ends up in a tornado?
Tend to die badly,
plucked dies, is very important.
What happen?
What the nineteenth century this idea was born beautiful,
the owners of poultry houses they see a lot of plucked chickens on the ground
and then ask:
I can understand how strong the tornado
the number of plucked chickens that I find on the ground?
In practice, the plucked chicken
It is a good unit of measurement for the power of a tornado?
If they ask, initially also they give an affirmative answer to this thing
only that the evidence they do at the end of ‘800
It is take the chickens, insert them into cannon, shoot them in the air,
But the explosion did not take into account that basically does that, too.
Then, after about a century, comes another physical
who decides to take the chickens
and throw them in the wind tunnel to see what happens,
and he discovers that it is not a good measurement units.
Because?
Why did the chicken,
a bit ‘like the lizard that loses its tail when you pull it to him,
the chicken, in stressful situations,
dilates the pores of the skin and makes it slip away pens.
Because? Because if the first dog.
who has just finished his needs,
looking north to go see a chicken, she tries to bite him by accident.
And what happens?
That tends bites plumage.
The chicken in stressful situations release the feathers, and zompetta away happy.
The dog remains with only the feathers in his mouth.
This is a defense mechanism.
But a tornado raises a chicken because the chicken weighs five pounds,
It is that the tornado is strong whether it is weak.
The chicken, for the first time in his life, try the thrill of flying,
It tends to be stressed out and then loses the feathers apart:
is not a good measurement units.
Prize for Meteorology in ’97 for his study
“The defeathering of a chicken as a measure of a” tornado speed.
But talk of spaghetti:
those of you who never breaks the spaghetti before cooking?
The door is there.
(Laughs)
A cook will be dead,
I see myself Cannavacciuolo with syncope at this time.
Now, what happens, we do a thought experiment:
Take spaghetti,
take a piece of spaghetti for the ends and try to close it in a circle.
What happen?
It breaks … three!
Someone tells me three because, in fact, does not break into two:
spaghetti breaks tend to be in three or four parts,
the chronicles up to ten –
to me it never happened, and I have many broken.
This phenomenon has troubled so much a Nobel Prize in physics,
little person smart enough, Richard Feynman,
who broke noodles for years
trying to figure out why this thing.
He never understood – when sadness –
but if you did not understand Richard Feynman, why should we understand it?
This is a good question!
Because we have something that Richard Feynman had not,
basically we have two:
We supercomputer simulations to do
and we have the cameras for slow motion, slow-motion replays of those matches.
What happen?
If you broken in front of one of these cameras spaghetti
you see that the strand reaches a limit curvature
and at some point it breaks.
We expect it, perfect.
What will happen to the two pieces when I broke it I?
They should basically back straight on their way.
In fact not the case. Because?
Because when the broken you,
start two waves
which they run the two fragments in which you have broken spaghetti
and these waves continue to bend spaghetti,
even they do bend 50% more than they have bent you at the beginning,
then the spaghetti breaks in turn into two,
you will broken in two,
you actually have four pieces.
Enthusiasm for this thing.
(Laughs)
When a physicist finds a thing
He wants to understand what the law regulating this.
The law is the law of Kirchhoff to the dynamics of thin bars,
I guess you all know them.
I just see people convinced.
Now, because we are interested in this thing?
Tend we do not care,
but if I told you that the same rule to break the pillars of a bridge
or DNA when superavvolge too in the cell nucleus?
Perhaps this is a bit ‘more important.
Prize for physics in 2006 for their analysis that explains
why the uncooked spaghetti, when bent, tend to break into parts.
But let’s talk about Japanese, Japanese very strong in the Ig Nobel awards –
and should we ask ourselves two questions regardless of ..
Mold amoeboid, Physarum polycephalum,
is a mold that is crazy about oatmeal, because sweets,
then the Japanese have set themselves the question that we would put forth all:
molds knows solve puzzles?
Puzzle English, puzzles.
What did they do?
They built a labirintino, they put a lot of mold and waited.
Mold expands looking nutrients, looking sugar,
the entrance and exit of the maze have put oatmeal.
After a few hours, the mold was no longer on the whole maze,
but only on the road leading from the entrance at the exit of the maze.
Because?
Because it created a sugar transport chain.
This is the award for the cognitive sciences in 2008,
but the same team won a second Ig Nobel
and is the only team in history to win it.
She placed on the table of oatmeal – you’ll definitely recognized:
This is the arrangement of Tokyo and the cities of Tokyo province,
He took a Godzillone mold,
He planted on the Tokyo and he did expand.
What happens?
That mold expands and at one point,
see these yellow veins
They begin to create between a bow and the other?
What will begin to sound, this image?
Take the network of railway transport in Tokyo and the province,
overlap them and the overlap will be almost perfect.
Not perfect because the network built from the mold in 26 hours
It is better than man-made more than a century.
Then, the molds are more intelligent than engineers?
If you ask the answer it is a physical one,
but we can not say, so no,
(Laughs)
They are more efficient in finding sugar.
The problem is what?
That is if I teach a computer to do this thing,
then mathematically to predict the movement of a mold,
I’m teaching you create
of transport networks, neural networks, electrical grids.
But does anyone think that a vascolarizzi tumor,
then you move and create blood vessels to steal the blood guest
in the same way in which the mold develops these pseudo-poda
ie these tentacles.
This was the prize for the planning of the 2010 transport,
but we started with a very simple question:
Harvard because it spends money in this thing?
The motto is
“Searches that first make people laugh, and then make they think”
reflect that in the science of curiosity
and you get to things far more complex
and uses of our unexpected solutions.
My work started constructing telescopes on the volcano
and at one point we realized
that with these telescopes could study us the volcano itself,
then telescopes in real space telescopes.
This, by the way, we can do it
only with the help of local businesses,
so also moves the economy.
When people say to me:
“Why should I believe in science, these unnecessary studies?”.
my answer is usually: “Know Ig Nobel awards?”
(Applause)
Every year, on December 10,
in the concert hall in Stockholm,
the no longer young King of Sweden
gives people tend no longer young
perhaps the most prestigious of existing awards,
or the Nobel Prize.
[The] Nobel Prize will know more or less:
there for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature,
there is also that for peace that is given in Norway,
there is one for the economy, there is the math,
Nobel apparently they were not very nice mathematicians.
How to blame him, by the way!
But the problem is what?
It is that this award I do not I can win, basically.
I looked in the mirror, I said:
look at your actual capabilities, look at your diet,
at that age you will not get there.
So I had to … (Laughter)
I had to think of something new, to another award.
I found it, it’s beautiful, is the Ig Nobel prize,
really exists, is awarded annually
the strangest research, funny and even absurd.
And it’s a really elegant ceremony,
a ceremony in which I am really looking to participate.
This is an article last year in which I and my colleague
We found a match
between the rate of suicide attempts in 28 countries worldwide
and the airing of “Gray’s Anatomy”.
Now … there really match,
we have not invented the data, I invite you to read the study.
Unfortunately, the article inexplicably
It has not attracted the attention it deserved, but fingers crossed.
Now, what we just said: the IgNobel prizes.
The question, though, that I want to do is this:
These prizes are awarded by Harvard,
that is not really the first past the street.
The winners are then brought at MIT in Boston,
Also here a fairly prestigious institute,
and here it is allowed to present their ideas.
The question is:
because Harvard and MIT
lose time, money and a lot of resources
to reward the ten craziest year’s investigation,
to reward people who go to collect the prize
with a toilet seat on his head
or building of the prosthesis to live like capre-
I swear, this was a prize this year.
Now let’s analyze some of these awards,
we try to give us an answer.
These are the herring, you will have recognized,
herring are swimming in counter.
Because herring swim in counter?
Tend because something is attracting all in the same direction.
You take a gadget of “Star Wars”, throw it on the one hand,
all astrophysicists they going in that direction.
If you take the light or food,
herring all move in that direction,
but so they do to defend themselves from predators.
I, large shark, I see a herring single, I’ll take it, I eat it.
If I see so many herring, maybe I think above
because I take it as a whale, a huge fish ball -So, you do.
Now, the point is that we know for a long time
that the herring swim in office, and also because,
but we did not know how they moved in counter.
As they move in counter?
We recently found out: the first herring, Cape Herring,
moves, decides to go to the right
and it makes a fart.
The second herring – I’m not making this up, it works really well –
the second herring perceives sound at high frequencies
the bubbles created in the water,
then he realizes that Cape Herring went right,
she goes to the right, in its turn does his thing and so on.
Herrings move in the counter like this:
Prize for biology in 2004 for having made known
that herrings apparently communicate with flatulence,
technical term but in short, what we are ..
However I do not see the enthusiasm that I wanted,
then we start (Laughter) we move on to another award.
Those of you who keeps dogs, a dog?
Perfect.
Which one of you, in addition to the dog, it has a compass?
Nothing: dogs and bushes are incompatible.
Perfect.
Let pay if a compass,
bring your dog in a meadow
and observe carefully while doing bisognini.
What do you discover?
A beautiful thing, I do not know if any you ever realized:
the 95% of dogs is their own needs by aligning the axis of your body
with the north-south axis.
The 5% that it does not have younger dogs, most anarchists, then over time they line up.
(Laughs)
This thing is the prize for biology 2014
to have carefully documented 5,500 tests
that dogs, when they make their needs.
prefer to align the axis of their body
with Earth’s magnetic field, in the direction north-south.
We knew the bees,
who felt the earth’s magnetic field,
ants; duck; we did not know dogs.
It’s stupid to know?
Mica too, because in reality the dogs we use them for search and rescue,
so when there is a flood or an earthquake,
you lose the signs to figure out where you are, you lose the orientation.
Knowing that the dog knows to point north,
and will always do,
because if you can do it in time of need
I will also do in general,
You could also have its uses.
But if there excites even the dog, we talk about chickens.
What happens to a chicken that ends up in a tornado?
Tend to die badly,
plucked dies, is very important.
What happen?
What the nineteenth century this idea was born beautiful,
the owners of poultry houses they see a lot of plucked chickens on the ground
and then ask:
I can understand how strong the tornado
the number of plucked chickens that I find on the ground?
In practice, the plucked chicken
It is a good unit of measurement for the power of a tornado?
If they ask, initially also they give an affirmative answer to this thing
only that the evidence they do at the end of ‘800
It is take the chickens, insert them into cannon, shoot them in the air,
But the explosion did not take into account that basically does that, too.
Then, after about a century, comes another physical
who decides to take the chickens
and throw them in the wind tunnel to see what happens,
and he discovers that it is not a good measurement units.
Because?
Why did the chicken,
a bit ‘like the lizard that loses its tail when you pull it to him,
the chicken, in stressful situations,
dilates the pores of the skin and makes it slip away pens.
Because? Because if the first dog.
who has just finished his needs,
looking north to go see a chicken, she tries to bite him by accident.
And what happens?
That tends bites plumage.
The chicken in stressful situations release the feathers, and zompetta away happy.
The dog remains with only the feathers in his mouth.
This is a defense mechanism.
But a tornado raises a chicken because the chicken weighs five pounds,
It is that the tornado is strong whether it is weak.
The chicken, for the first time in his life, try the thrill of flying,
It tends to be stressed out and then loses the feathers apart:
is not a good measurement units.
Prize for Meteorology in ’97 for his study
“The defeathering of a chicken as a measure of a” tornado speed.
But talk of spaghetti:
those of you who never breaks the spaghetti before cooking?
The door is there.
(Laughs)
A cook will be dead,
I see myself Cannavacciuolo with syncope at this time.
Now, what happens, we do a thought experiment:
Take spaghetti,
take a piece of spaghetti for the ends and try to close it in a circle.
What happen?
It breaks … three!
Someone tells me three because, in fact, does not break into two:
spaghetti breaks tend to be in three or four parts,
the chronicles up to ten –
to me it never happened, and I have many broken.
This phenomenon has troubled so much a Nobel Prize in physics,
little person smart enough, Richard Feynman,
who broke noodles for years
trying to figure out why this thing.
He never understood – when sadness –
but if you did not understand Richard Feynman, why should we understand it?
This is a good question!
Because we have something that Richard Feynman had not,
basically we have two:
We supercomputer simulations to do
and we have the cameras for slow motion, slow-motion replays of those matches.
What happen?
If you broken in front of one of these cameras spaghetti
you see that the strand reaches a limit curvature
and at some point it breaks.
We expect it, perfect.
What will happen to the two pieces when I broke it I?
They should basically back straight on their way.
In fact not the case. Because?
Because when the broken you,
start two waves
which they run the two fragments in which you have broken spaghetti
and these waves continue to bend spaghetti,
even they do bend 50% more than they have bent you at the beginning,
then the spaghetti breaks in turn into two,
you will broken in two,
you actually have four pieces.
Enthusiasm for this thing.
(Laughs)
When a physicist finds a thing
He wants to understand what the law regulating this.
The law is the law of Kirchhoff to the dynamics of thin bars,
I guess you all know them.
I just see people convinced.
Now, because we are interested in this thing?
Tend we do not care,
but if I told you that the same rule to break the pillars of a bridge
or DNA when superavvolge too in the cell nucleus?
Perhaps this is a bit ‘more important.
Prize for physics in 2006 for their analysis that explains
why the uncooked spaghetti, when bent, tend to break into parts.
But let’s talk about Japanese, Japanese very strong in the Ig Nobel awards –
and should we ask ourselves two questions regardless of ..
Mold amoeboid, Physarum polycephalum,
is a mold that is crazy about oatmeal, because sweets,
then the Japanese have set themselves the question that we would put forth all:
molds knows solve puzzles?
Puzzle English, puzzles.
What did they do?
They built a labirintino, they put a lot of mold and waited.
Mold expands looking nutrients, looking sugar,
the entrance and exit of the maze have put oatmeal.
After a few hours, the mold was no longer on the whole maze,
but only on the road leading from the entrance at the exit of the maze.
Because?
Because it created a sugar transport chain.
This is the award for the cognitive sciences in 2008,
but the same team won a second Ig Nobel
and is the only team in history to win it.
She placed on the table of oatmeal – you’ll definitely recognized:
This is the arrangement of Tokyo and the cities of Tokyo province,
He took a Godzillone mold,
He planted on the Tokyo and he did expand.
What happens?
That mold expands and at one point,
see these yellow veins
They begin to create between a bow and the other?
What will begin to sound, this image?
Take the network of railway transport in Tokyo and the province,
overlap them and the overlap will be almost perfect.
Not perfect because the network built from the mold in 26 hours
It is better than man-made more than a century.
Then, the molds are more intelligent than engineers?
If you ask the answer it is a physical one,
but we can not say, so no,
(Laughs)
They are more efficient in finding sugar.
The problem is what?
That is if I teach a computer to do this thing,
then mathematically to predict the movement of a mold,
I’m teaching you create
of transport networks, neural networks, electrical grids.
But does anyone think that a vascolarizzi tumor,
then you move and create blood vessels to steal the blood guest
in the same way in which the mold develops these pseudo-poda
ie these tentacles.
This was the prize for the planning of the 2010 transport,
but we started with a very simple question:
Harvard because it spends money in this thing?
The motto is
“Searches that first make people laugh, and then make they think”
reflect that in the science of curiosity
and you get to things far more complex
and uses of our unexpected solutions.
My work started constructing telescopes on the volcano
and at one point we realized
that with these telescopes could study us the volcano itself,
then telescopes in real space telescopes.
This, by the way, we can do it
only with the help of local businesses,
so also moves the economy.
When people say to me:
“Why should I believe in science, these unnecessary studies?”.
my answer is usually: “Know Ig Nobel awards?”
(Applause)
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