Japanese professor wins Ig Nobel prize for study on knob turning

It is one of life’s overlooked arts: the optimal way to turn a knob. Now an investigation into this neglected question has been recognised with one of science’s most coveted accolades: an Ig Nobel prize.

Other awards at the virtual ceremony on Thursday evening include the physics prize for showing why ducklings swim in a line formation, and the economics prize for explaining, mathematically, why success most often goes not to the most talented people, but instead to the luckiest. An international collaboration won the peace prize for devising an algorithm to help gossipers decide when to tell the truth and when to lie.

After analysing video footage of 32 volunteers turning 47 knobs of assorted sizes, the researchers deduced that to turn a knob wider than 1cm, three fingers are normally required, with a shift to four and five fingers occurring when a knob exceeds 2.5cm and 5cm in diameter.

The literature prize went to a team who analysed what makes legal documents so impenetrable. “We all had this intuition that legal language is dense, but we really need to know empirically: how bad is it?” said Francis Mollica, who worked on the study at the University of Edinburgh. The paper concluded that poor writing, not complicated concepts, is to blame.

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