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The IGNOBEL PRIZE for 2024, presented by Miles Mathis, is critiqued as a form of science propaganda rather than genuine satire. Mathis, initially dismissive of the awards, found this year’s presentation on NPR to be particularly unconvincing and unfunny, with emcees Marc Abrahams and Kate Silverman Wilson lacking comedic timing. The event, sponsored by Harvard Computer Society, Harvard–Radcliffe Science Fiction Association, and Harvard–Radcliffe Society of Physics Students, was held at MIT this year, having previously been associated with Harvard. Mathis believes the Ignobel Prize is linked to CSICOP, which he describes as a front for suppressing “Against-the-Mainstream ideas.”
He highlights Andre Geim as an exception, who won an Ignobel Prize in 2000 for levitating frogs and later a Nobel Prize for his work on graphene. Mathis speculates that Geim, described as an Ashkenazi Jew whose mother is Bayer, navigated academic blockades by moving from Russia and Netherlands to England, later joining the University of Manchester and presenting his “genealogy certificates.”
Mathis argues that several Ignobel Prize winners’ findings, dismissed as trivial by the award ceremony, actually support his theory of a charge field. This includes the anatomy prize for human head hair whorls moving in different directions in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, which Mathis connects to his 2011 paper on the Coriolis Effect and suggests Harvard and MIT are “blackwashing” his discoveries. He explains the frog levitation as being due to the charge field focused by a magnetic field, essentially being levitated by “a hail of spinning photons.”
Similarly, the botany prize for plants mimicking plastic neighbors is seen by Mathis as evidence of plants sensing the charge field. He also connects this to plants’ ability to track the sun, interpreting light as charge. The physics prize for a dead fish swimming like a live one is interpreted as evidence that charge in water interacts with the fish even after death, suggesting environmental impulses influence motion beyond the nervous system.
Mathis also discusses the medical research prize for the placebo effect being enhanced by induced pain, viewing it as an attempt to ridicule the placebo effect to prevent self-healing, which is “not profitable.” The chemistry prize, awarded for separating drunk and sober worms using chromatography, is seen as an attempt to “blackwash” chromatography because it links to Mathis’s work on plants using charge to move substances in xylem and phloem.
The “7 lectures” between awards are also deemed propaganda, particularly a segment on bad art by Louise Sacco, head of the Museum of Bad Art (MOBA) in Boston, located in the Dorchester Brewery. Mathis views MOBA’s association with Black Lives Matter and gay promotion as indicative of a CIA front, further undermining the legitimacy of the Ignobel Prize. He concludes that the Ignobel Prize consistently ridicules important findings while promoting what he deems trivial.