• The Ceremony
• Ig Informal Lectures
• Previous years
• Press contacts

The 2012 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony
Thursday, September 20
Sanders Theater, Harvard University

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The 22nd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony will introduce ten new Ig Nobel Prize winners. The winners travel to the ceremony, at their own expense, from several continents. The Prizes are handed to them by a group of genuine, genuinely bemused Nobel Laureates, assisted by a large number of assorted Ig personnel, all before a perpetually standing-room only audience. The ceremony will include many other delights—see details below. (For the latest Ig Nobel news, see the blog.)

If you have five (5) or more tickets to the Ig Nobel ceremony, your group can choose to be an Official Audience Delegation, and thus be officially celebrated during the event. To register as a Delegation, first obtain tickets from the Harvard Box Office. Then register with Grand Panjandrum of the Delegations Louise Sacco: (+1) 781-444-6757. The most colorful delegations will be selected to march gloriously into the theater. The deadline for registering is Friday, September 14.

The ceremony will be webcast live as it happens. There will be webcast-watching parties around the world. Please feel free to contact us for information or assistance on organizing your own, or to notify us so that we may help publicize it.

The theme of this year's ceremony (though not necessarily of the individual prizes) is: THE UNIVERSE.

In addition to the awarding of the 2012 Ig Nobel Prizes, the ceremony will include a variety of momentously inconsequential events. Among them:

• Several Nobel laureates will physically hand the Ig Nobel Prizes to the new winners
• Keynote Address by Robert Kirshner
• The 24/7 Lectures, in which several of the world's top thinkers will explain her or his subject twice:
  FIRST: a complete technical description in TWENTY-FOUR (24) SECONDS*
  AND THEN: a clear summary that anyone can understand, in SEVEN (7) WORDS
• Pre-ceremony mini-concert (starting at 7:15 pm) by "KEROMIN" The Amazing FROGS
• World premiere of a brand new mini-opera
  
• Returning Ig Nobel Prize winners:
  • Kees Moeliker (first scentifically documented case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck)
  • Dr. Elena Bodnar (invention of an emergency bra that can be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks)
  • Mahadevan (mathematico-physics analysis of how sheets get wrinkled)
  • Dr. Richard Gustafson (failure of self-administered automobile-engine-supplied-electric-shock treatment for rattlesnake envenomation resulting from patient's pet rattlesnake biting the patient on the lip)
  • Dr. Francis Fesmire (Digital rectal massage as a cure for intractable hiccups)
  • and perhaps others
• Ceremonial band music by Nicholas Carstoiu and The Ig Leaves.
• The Win-a-Date-With-a-Nobel-Laureate Contest
• Karen Hopkin, creator of the Studmuffins of Science Calendar
• Gala Introduction of the Audience Delegations
• All speeches will be brief, and thus especially delightful, with assistance from 8-year-old Miss Sweetie Poo.
• The Minordomos will make most things run smoothly on stage.
• The V-Chip Monitor, Prominent New York Attorney William J. Maloney, will guard against offensive words, sounds, thoughts, or imaginings.
• The Traditional "Welcome, Welcome" Speech
• The Traditional "Goodbye, Goodbye" Speech
• Other wondrous things

* Time limits to be enforced by Mr. John Barrett, the Ig Nobel Referee

The Ig Informal Lectures
Saturday, Sep 22, 2012, 1:00 pm.
MIT (room to be announced)

A half-afternoon of improbably funny, informative, informal, brief public lectures and demonstrations:

• The new Ig Nobel Prize winners will attempt to explain what they did, and why they did it
• Select past winners will tell us about some of their new adventures
• Everyone will be available for you to talk with, both before and after the lectures

Press Contacts:

Annals of Improbable Research editor Marc Abrahams, (+1) 617-491-4437
Improbable facilitator Katherine Meusey, (+1) 415-609-0837
Annals of Improbable Research European Bureau Chief Kees Moeliker (Rotterdam, The Netherlands, (+31) 6 53778445

Special Thanks To...

All Ig Nobel Prizes activities are organized by the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR). The ceremony is co-sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association (HRSFA), the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students (SPS), the Harvard Computer Society, and the book The Man Who Tried to Clone Himself, published by Plume Books, New York, ISBN 0452287723.