Scienza Squilibrata

THE IDEA

 

The idea people have about scientists is usually that of very serious people. They represent objectivity, fairness, the whole World scientific awareness.

It may happen, though, leafing through scientific magazines - also top-level ones - to bump into publications like: “Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed”. The first reaction people have while reading something like this is a good laugh. At a later stage, we wonder who the author is and it is then we are really taken aback: it is not unusual to find out that hiding behind these publications there are high-level academics, often awarded prizes and acknowledgments of international level, if not even a Nobel prize. 

What happened to those brilliant minds? Did they lose their mental balance? We won’t have a precise answer to this question, and the conception people have of a mad scientist might have some reasonable background.

What we know for sure is the existence of a special prize. An annual prize, in many different subjects, is handed out to the ten most imaginative and unusual researches: the Ig Nobel Prize.

Are these studies really useless? The Ig Nobel Prizes motto is to honor "achievements that make people laugh, and then think".

 

 

THE LAB

 

​The lab will not only be talking randomly about some amusing awards, there will be some time to think about the motivations that inspire researchers to invest their precious time and energy on these “unbalanced” scientific researches. We will also analyze the key role of Science in everyday life, showing how problems that appear easy to solve can have really subtle solutions.

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Depending on the age of the audience, some selected prizes will be used to propose exhibits and experiments to the public. We will show how the Science behind these prizes is not trivial at all, and how apparently simple life examples can be connected to complex systems. The audience will discover how horse tails balance has the same mechanism as the Earth-Moon interaction, or how DNA wrapping can be predicted using the same equations governing the bending and breaking of spaghetti.

 

​The public will be guided through all of this crazy journey by some comics by Angelo Adamo, astrophysicist, cartoonist and writer, scientific​ explainer at Bologna ​Observatory and auhor of many science themed comic stips.

 

​Eventually, our journey will continue in an interactive exhibition on more and more Ig Nobel ​prizes, ​thanks to descriptions, ​anecdotes and video on the topics.

 

 

DIDACTIC GOALS

 

Why do we want to create a Science Festival activity regarding these researches which appear to be not so useful? 

To have the visitor go through a funny and engaging path towards the discovery of everyday science, showing how the World of researchers is fundamental to guarantee the preservation of the natural balance of our planet. 

A reflection on how science is not an abstract reality and hidden from the everyday life, as it is often perceived: the analysis of more complex systems - from the infinitely large cosmos to the infinitely small of DNA - can only arise from science of all days.

Problems that, while apparently easy to resolve, hide pitfalls and difficulties.

The overall goal of our laboratory is the same one a s the Ig Nobel prizes: to make people laugh stay in their mind and to them think about this afterwards.