Episode about Ig Nobel prizes? (and some food for thought from a scientist)

I'm finishing up my PhD soon in experimental physics. One thing I've always enjoyed reading and thinking about is Ig Nobel prizes. For those who don't know, the [Ig Nobel prizes] (https://improbable.com/ig/winners/) are sort of a parody Nobel prize, given to scientific pursuits that make you laugh, and then make you think. They're really fun to read through, here are just some examples:

-Peace Prize, 2025: "Fritz Renner, Inge Kersbergen, Matt Field, and Jessica Werthmann, for showing that drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak in a foreign language." -Medicine Prize, 2024: "Lieven A. Schenk, Tahmine Fadai, and Christian Büchel, for demonstrating that fake medicine that causes painful side-effects can be more effective than fake medicine that does not cause painful side-effects." -Physics Prize, 2024: "James C. Liao, for demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout."

They are always on topics that are right up the ally of the show and the hosts.

I often see topics of research from Ig Nobel prizes that are covered by labs outside of their research area. These are often experiments that the scientists realize they have the equipment to do, and they simply pursue it out of passion or curiosity (for example, 2015 Ig Nobel prize awarded to a protein research group at UC Irvine for unboiling an egg). As an experimentalist, I often try to think of fun or wacky experiments I could perform, and I've found it actually takes a great deal of creativity and imagination to come up with a good one.

I'd also argue that pursuing experiments like these can be of immense benefit to society and science. Take the physicist Andre Geim. Geim's lab is famous for doing a "Friday Physics," where they would use Friday nights to pursue playful, unconventional, sometimes useless sounding physics just for fun. Geim and Michael Berry famously won the 2000 Ig Nobel prize for one such experiment: levitating a frog using a magnetic field. (An aside, Michael Berry would go on to be real Nobel prize contender. His contributions to theoretical physics are numerous, including such metrics as the Berry phase and Berry curvature in condensed matter)

Another Friday night would be much more consequential. For a long time, a 2D metallic compound (so just a one atom layer thick compound) was thought to be impossible to synthesize, but would have profound material properties if realized. Geim one Friday night was playing with a pencil and scotch tape and realized he could get a thin film of graphite on the tape by ripping it off in the right way. When measuring the thickness of the graphite on the tape, he found the layer to be exactly one atom thick. And thus, graphene had been created for the first time, birthing the field of 2D materials. Geim would win the real Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010, and graphene is still one of the hottest areas of physics.

Anyways, just some thoughts about creativity in science I thought I'd share as I wrap up my PhD :)