Marc Abrahams: Being pope of improbable science

In this edition of Titans of Science, Chris Smith chats with co-founder of Annals of Improbable Research, and the master of ceremonies for the Ig Nobel prize, Marc Abrahams…

Chris - This has won you quite a lot of attention around the world over. I was having a look into your kind of CV and I didn't realize Le Monde, the famous French newspaper, have described you as the pope of improbable science. I mean, that's quite an accolade, Isn't it? The Washington Post says you are the nation's guru of academic grunge and it says here that Harvard Business School has run a case study on you called Marc Abraham's Annals of an improbable entrepreneur. So you are famous on many levels. Do you have a favorite nickname?

Marc - Uh, Marc <laugh>.

Chris - Well, you've gone into podcasting, haven't you? Very much brought this into the next era of broadcast and I suppose information dissemination. So is that basically doing the same thing as the Ig Nobel ceremony or are you talking about different things?

Marc - We're not doing it at the moment. We shut it down for a while because it was a huge amount of work on top of the huge amount of work. That started about 10 years ago when one of the big radio networks here, CBS Radio, called up one day and said they wanted to get into the business of podcasting. And so they were looking for a bunch of people who did unusual things to start up a podcast. So the first couple of years we were doing it as part of CBS Radio and then CBS Radio in a <laugh> classic modern business story, suddenly decided to blow itself up. So that disappeared. And I'll tell you a story about something else because it grew out of another thing we'd already started doing as live events. The other thing is something we call 'dramatic improbable readings,' or 'improbable dramatic readings,' I can never quite remember which title we use. And that was and is to take some of the scientific reports that are piled up here, the things people send us, some of which have gone on to win Ig Nobel Prizes, many of which we've written about in my magazine, in the Annals of Improbable Research. And most scientific reports in the world are written in a language that almost nobody would want to understand or could understand. They're written for tiny, tiny, very specialised audiences, and they're written in language that's sometimes intentionally difficult to understand, but should be impressive. However, amidst all the thousands of those, there are some reports that are written very differently, and there are even some reports that are written in a difficult way that have passages in the middle of them that are just beautiful, that if you only saw this chunk of words, you could easily believe that this was written by a great playwright to be done on the stage, or somebody who writes movie scripts or somebody writes for TV or somebody who writes novels. And one day, as an experiment, I invited a bunch of people to come to the public library here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The head of the library offered to let me use their auditorium, and I brought a pile of these scientific reports and we had a whole bunch of different people here from many different backgrounds who all seemed to like to perform one way or another. So I asked each of them to just look through this pile of reports, just pick one of them that interests you a little bit. And pick out exactly two minutes worth of words and you will be an actor. Pretend these words were written as a script and it was working really well. And then I learned something. Often you learn really valuable things because you were very wrong. And this was a case of that I had one rule for all the performers and for the audience, which is that no matter how interesting you and the audience find this, we're not going to allow any questions because each of the people reading one of these reports to you, they don't know any more about what they're saying than you do. They only saw this 15 minutes ago, so it would be crazy to ask them questions. You're not allowed to ask questions. But everybody wanted to ask questions. <laugh>, after each performer would do their two minute dramatic reading, the hands would fly up. People wanted questions. So I bowed to public demand here and said, okay, you can ask questions of each of the readers, but here's the rule in the audience. Ask any question you want a dramatic reader to answer however you want with this one rule, no bullshitting. It's okay to say you don't know something, and it's okay to speculate as long as you make it clear that you're speculating. We've done many events of these dramatic readings and they always work out really well, and the questions and answers are always the best part. The thing that I thought should have been prohibited, turned out to be always the best part. And in the podcast, each time I would get a scientist or sometimes more than one, to do this same thing, I would give them one of these reports on something way outside their professional competence and ask them, pick out a few words here, a few little passages here, and do a dramatic reading. And I'm going to interrupt you and ask you questions about that, and we'll talk about that. And that's what the podcast is. So we're not talking about the knowledge that's in these things. It's really more about the questions. And so the discussions, because these are all really smart people, we have really fun discussions about how could, if you wanted to know how to do this thing, how would you even begin and how would you, how could you possibly assure yourself that doing this experiment this way would tell you anything at all? That it's not just insane or foolish. That's what the podcast is about.

Chris - What does Mrs. Abrahams make of what you get up to?

Marc - <Laugh> Fortunately, she likes this stuff. She's very funny and very smart. And she herself has a PhD in psychology. She also has a background as an actor and a comedian, and she is very supportive of this stuff. We met, in fact, because of the Ig Nobel Prizes a lot of years ago, <laugh> in the early years of the Igs. Because we don't, the Igs, and the magazine really don't have any money. We depend entirely on volunteers. So we'd put out a notice one year that we're organising this year's Ig Nobel ceremony. We could use a few more volunteers who have a good theatrical background. And Robin, now my wife, was at a point in grad school where she had a little breathing room and she wanted to get back to doing some theater things and to meet some people. And so she volunteered and we hit it off. And then she very quickly said, 'you know, look, you're going to have to make a decision. You can either have a really great assistant for the show or you can have a girlfriend, but you can't have both in me.' And she's been really great.

Chris - And then you do get both, because inevitably I bet she does. I bet your house is full of these manuscripts, isn't it? I mean, if my house has anything to go by, it's probably got quite a prodigious amount of this stuff. All, every surface. That's my guess.

Marc - It used to be like that, but now almost all of it is sitting on a hard disc <laugh> and many backups of hard discs. So yeah, a tremendous amount of material, but it's all in digital form or most of it.

Chris - Well, it's been a real pleasure to have the pope of the improbable talk to me for the last half hour or so.

Marc - Bless you.

Chris - Thank you. Thank you for conferring that upon me. And I suppose we all should acknowledge you being the nation's guru of grunge, academic grunge.

Marc - Chris, there's something I should say to you too, speaking as the pope

Chris - Go on.

Marc - The people who are going to be hearing this over the Christmas season and in the Northern Hemisphere, it's probably pretty cold. And even though I know you like being a Naked Scientist, this is the time of year to bundle up a little, isn't it?

Chris - Well, I head down south and solve the problem that way, but yeah, you're right. It's not the season. It is the season to be jolly, not the season to be naked.

Marc - Yeah, however, you know, in short bursts, why not?