The annual Ig Nobel awards are given each year to scientists to honor work that might sound funny, but will then make you think. Watching the ceremonies is very amusing!
This year’s physics prize proves something that we know already! This Ig Nobel prize went to “Dorian Raymer of the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA, and Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego, USA, for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.”
REFERENCE: “Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String,” Dorian M. Raymer and Douglas E. Smith, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 104, no. 42, October 16, 2007, pp. 16432-7.