Crackpot can jolly well be cutting edge

The frivolous and serious, the crackpot and cutting edge, are kissing cousins, especially in the world of science. This insight is celebrated annually by the Ig Nobel awards given to achievements that ‘first make people laugh, and then make them think’. This year’s awards announced on Thursday at MIT include Japanese researchers’ discovery of something we had always suspected: that mammals can breathe through their anuses; US jugaad-style research involving placing pigeons inside missiles to guide them to their targets; Oxford Uni research shedding light on how an overwhelming number of cases of old age are bunkum and arise from clerical errors, no birth certificates and pension fraud; American-German research finding evidence of the South American boquila plant mimicking leaves of plastic plants next to it – pointing to the fascinating notion of ‘plant vision‘.

Great scientific breakthroughs often come from what snotty-nosed coat-wearers see as irreverent and irrelevant. But history tells us otherwise. Insulin was discovered after observing dog pee. The first evidence of the Big Bang – birth of the universe – came after confirming that radio static was not coming from pigeon shit on the antenna. Not to mention ‘bizarre’ theories like evolution, heliocentricity and the existence of microscopic organisms later called ‘germs’.