The announcement of this year's Ig Nobel Prizes, for “achievements that make people laugh, and then make them think”, included one for physicists Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan of Harvard University and Enrique Cerda Villablanca of the Universidad de Santiago de Chile, who won the award for studying how thin elastic sheets become wrinkled. That doesn't sound strange to a physicist, but presumably it does to the general public. The Ig Nobels amuse because they catch scientists studying what seems to be ridiculous, although it often turns out to be entirely sensible — knowledge or capability in one area of science is almost always important in others, sometimes in the most unexpected ways.
A nice illustration comes from recent experiments on microfractures in crystals, more sensitive than previous ones by several orders of magnitude, and capable of measuring events that release only a few femtojoules — equivalent to the breaking of a few hundred bonds. Naively, one might suppose that such a huge advance resulted from a focused effort on that specific goal, yet the truth is rather different.
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