Feeding worms drunk and endlessly flipping coins: two Ig Nobel prizes for UvA research
It made their thumbs numb, but it was worth it: UvA researchers won the Ig Nobel Prize, a parody of the Nobel Prize, by flipping coins 350,757 times. Other UvA researchers won the same prize by getting worms drunk. Altogether, two of the ten Ig Nobel prizes awarded annually have been awarded to UvA research.
Rather than a real Nobel Prize, UvA physicist Daniel Bonn dreamed of the Ig Nobel Prize. That prize is a parody of the Nobel Prize and is awarded annually to ten studies that first make you laugh and then make you think. On Thursday 12 September, Bonn, together with amongst others UvA chemist Sander received the prize for the experiment with drunk worms.
Woutersen remembers the worm experiment as “the funniest Friday afternoon experiment ever”. The researchers had come up with the idea of using worms as a model for active matter. Active matter is a collection of particles that can move on their own: a hot topic in biology, chemistry and physics.
Worm race
Worms proved to be the perfect model for active matter. Worms all wriggle in their own way and are also easily available at the aquarium shop, Woutersen recalled from the time he feeded the worm to his fishes as a child.
To do accurate experiments with the worms, it is important that they are all equally active, which is why the researchers wanted to separate the worms by activity. Bachelor student Tess Heeremans also happened to be in the lab and built a special maze through which the worms were flushed with a stream of water to separate them.
Then things really started to get fun in the lab that Friday afternoon. To increase the difference in activity between the worms, the researchers decided to feed half the worms drunk so that their activity would decrease. Once that succeeded, the worm race could begin.
That the drunk worms took longer to complete the maze does not seem surprising at first glance. But the researchers did find it surprising: on the contrary, they had thought that the drunken, passive worms would be more easily carried away by the current. And that taught the researchers something new about active matter.
Flipping a coin 350,757 times
UvA statistician František Bartoš and mathematical psychologist Eric-Jan Wagenmakers also won an Ig Nobel Prize together with an international team of researchers. Namely, they decided to test a 2007 physics model. According to that model, the outcome of the famous heads-or-tails game was not exactly fifty-fifty percent chance, as is always thought. The wobble the coin gets when it is tossed would affect the outcome. There was only one way to start testing that: by tossing a lot of coins.
350,757 tosses to be precise. By the way, the researchers did this in their spare time. They also organised marathons in which they flipped coins up to 12 hours. In total, the researchers tossed coins non-stop for 81 days and 8 hours. That did cause some cramp in the thumbs, but with massage-guns it was quite manageable, Wagenmakers described afterwards.
Fortunately, it was not in vain. Because it turned out: if you toss a coin head-first, there is a 50.8 per cent chance that it will end up head-first. Incidentally, this is not because of the coin but because of the throw. The thrower adds an extra wobble to the normal spin axis of the coin. The bigger that wobble, the more likely the coin is to end up on the starting side.
The suffering caused by all the tossing disappears even further from view now that the research has won the Ig Nobel Prize. Eric-Jan Wagenmakers: “It may seem absurd to toss coins 350,757 times in your spare time, and may be it is. But by now I would say it was more than worth all those painful thumbs up!”
