Miscellaneous

In Stockholm, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has begun handing out this year?s Nobel prizes. Meanwhile, another august group recently bestowed this year?s Ig Nobel prizes for ?achievements that first make people laugh, then think.?

Sometimes the work honored by the Ig Nobel prize has more immediate, practical ramifications than the work honored by the Nobel prize. Consider physics:

• The Nobel prize was awarded to one American scientist and two Japanese scientists for discoveries in subatomic physics. American Yoichiro Nambu won half of the prize for discovering a mechanism called spontaneous broken symmetry. Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan shared the other half of the prize for discovering the origin of the broken symmetry that predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.
• Meanwhile, the Ig Nobel prize went to Dorian Raymer of the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego, for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.