Moments in science: Aha and Aha-haha

(First of two parts)

October brings a tale of two separate annual, distinguished science awards. One carries over a million-dollar prize for each field, awarded in a solemn ceremony at Stockholm. It is attended by dignitaries, including the Swedish royalty, and allows the Nobel winner to give a much-awaited lecture on the research topic that has won him/her the Nobel. The other, the IgNobel, gives a hand-crafted wooden stand, punctuated at the top end with dentures frozen in a glorious grin and a piece of paper saying who won the said award signed by some past awardees in the other prestigious Stockholm event. The IgNobel is attended no less than by "Ignitaries," including the King and Queen of Swedish Meatballs and held at Sanders Theater in Harvard University. IgNobel awardees are allowed to give an acceptance speech within 60 seconds, policed by an adorable, little eight-year-old girl named Sweety Pooh, who alerts the IgNobel after the 60-second mark by walking to the side of the podium to say ever so unequivocally: "Please stop. I’m bored!" Sweety Pooh does not stop until the IgNobel awardee realizes that his time is up (brilliant cure to those long speeches by our own public officials!).

The Nobel organization has the tradition of calling up the Nobel winners minutes after they have been informed by telephone that they have won. In that interview lasting only about five to seven minutes, they ask the awardee when the "Aha" or "Eureka" moment is in their research – where everything suddenly fits! The IgNobel, by its very nature, also has that "Aha" moment but there’s more, since "Aha" later echoes into a healthy trail of "ha ha ha" because it is an award for research that makes us laugh and then makes us think. The IgNobel awards are given to legitimate scientific researches done by the awardees and published in journals, sometimes in the very journals where Nobel researches were also published.

The Nobel Laureates and IgNobel awardees know the kind of work they did to deserve their titles but you may not. So in a fit of compulsion to test anyone who is interested, I would like to give you a chance to check your own ability to detect "Aha" or "Aha-haha" science. I shall present to you the awardees and their winning research without indicating whether it was for a Nobel or IgNobel. You can just put an exclamation mark (!) for "Aha" science or a smiley (J) for what you think is science that is Aha-haha in the boxes indicated. Then strictly at your own risk or shame, show your score to your science teacher.

• Two US scientists, John C. Mather from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and George F. Smoot of the University of California in Berkeley, won their awards for Physics. They have found the cosmic equivalent of the voice of your mother (saying "brush your teeth, eat your vegetables, go to bed, turn off that TV") when you were still a kid, still giving off a faint echo in your head. The physicists’ tool, however, was a satellite called the Cosmic Background Explorer or COBE, launched in space in November 1989 to find this "echo," radiation far enough from interference from Earth. The first part of the discovery was a matter for Mather and his team who eventually traced evidence of the most ancient light detectable, produced 380,000 years after the mother of all beginnings – the Big Bang. This period – 380,000 years after the Big Bang – is the time the scientists think that the universe has cooled enough from the primordial Big Bang for the pioneer atoms –hydrogen – to exist. The largely accepted theory of the Big Bang predicted that this ancient light would have cooled to a uniform temperature by now. This precise temperature is a signature of a radiation called microwave background radiation which when drawn in a graph (intensity vs. wavelength) has a pattern. Mather and his team then set out to find it. After only nine minutes in space, the COBE gathered temperatures from different parts of the universe, and came up with a uniform 2.7 degrees above absolute zero, a radiation pattern consistent with the Big Bang prediction. Smoot and his team, for their part, figured out the astrophysical equivalent of why some of what your mother said to you in your childhood seem to have more effect on your life now than others. Also using COBE as their instrument, they figured out how the tiniest differences in the largely uniform temperatures in the universe, could have created the large scale structures that the universe is punctuated with – such as galaxies and stars.

• Another award for physics probably has the late Nobel couple Pierre and Marie Curie wondering whether the institute that now bears their names has become an Italian culinary laboratory. Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie published the results of their study in the August 2005 Physical Review Letters entitled "Fragmentation of Rods by Cascading Cracks: Why Spaghetti Does Not Break in Half." Because of this, it is quite reasonable for non-scientists to think that Physical Review Letters is a cookbook. But it is not; it is a prestigious physics journal – the same journal that published Nobel Laureate Physicist Steven Weinberg’s award-winning work on electro-weak theory. The two scientists showed that spaghetti is already bent and if you bend something already bent, it breaks into more than two. During the ceremonies, the two scientists noted the limitations of the relevance of their study and offered "practical" metaphors if there were ever one. The two men said, "Let your wife go, many women will come to you," but was quick to warn of the drawback, "Let your wife go, she may come back with her mother."

• Another prize for medicine went to Francis M. Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, for his medical case report "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage," and Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan, and Arie Oliven of Bnai Zion Medical Center, Haifa, Israel, for their subsequent medical case report also titled "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage." Fesmire thought he was receiving the award for his work on cardiac research but alas, it was for his 1988 published work in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. I admire the penetrating effort that Dr. Fesmire put in this particular work although I am inclined to suspect that anything intractable (like moves for Charter change), apart from hiccups, could be stopped by even just the suggestion of such a unique digital solution.

(To be continued)

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