The Mad Scientist Saves the Day

The Physics Ig Nobel Prize highlighted why pregnant women don’t fall over

The annual Ig Nobel Prizes were presented on 1 October. The prizes are awarded by Improbable Research, a US organisation that publicises ‘research that makes people laugh and then think’. This year’s winners included Donald Unger, a doctor who received the Medicine Prize for cracking the knuckles of his left hand—but not his right—for 60 years to see if the habit contributes to arthritis (it didn’t). And the Physics Prize highlighted a study about why pregnant women don’t fall over that was published in Nature.

Yet, such seemingly silly research can have major consequences. Consider the case of the ‘Frog Dancing-Master’. That was the mocking title given to Luigi Galvani, the 18th century Italian physicist who used a static electricity generator to make dissected frog legs twitch, revealing that the muscles of living beings are controlled by electric impulses that Galvani called ‘animal electricity’. This is one of the cornerstones of modern physiology and caused his name to be immortalised in the verb ‘galvanise’.