In a 1975 monograph called Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed, Bernard Vonnegut considers what might happen to a dead chicken if it were fired from a cannon. He explains: "One way of estimating the wind in a tornado vortex is to determine by experiment what air speed is required to blow all the feathers off a chicken, a phenomenon known to occur in severe storms."

The conventional wisdom about this technique can be found in HA Hazen's book The Tornado, published in 1890, which describes an 1842 experiment by Professor Elias Loomis at Western Reserve College in Ohio: "The stripping of fowls attracted much attention in this and other tornadoes. In order to determine the velocity needed to strip these feathers, the above six-pounder was loaded with five ounces of powder, and for a [canon]ball a chicken just killed [was used]. Loomis says: "The gun was pointed vertically upwards and fired. The feathers rose 20 or 30 feet, and were scattered by the wind. On examination, they were found to be pulled out clean, the skin seldom adhering to them. The body was torn to small fragments ... The velocity was 341mph. A fowl, then, forced through the air with this velocity is torn entirely to pieces; with a less velocity, ... most of the feathers might be pulled out without mutilating the body."

More than a century later, Vonnegut, a physicist at the State University of New York at Albany, analysed the process. Vonnegut, identified two subtleties of the firing-chicken-carcasses-from-cannons process.

First, "it is difficult to separate the effects produced by the explosion in the gun from those that are the result of the movement of the bird relative to the air," he writes. Second, a bird's feathers are sometimes easy to pluck, especially during a physiological response known as "flight-molt". Vonnegut explains that "during conditions of stress the bird's follicles relax so that feathers can be pulled out with far less force than is normally required. Possibly this may be a mechanism for survival, leaving a predator with only a mouthful of feathers and permitting the bird to escape".

Vonnegut concludes that because "the force required to remove the feathers from the follicles varies over a wide range in a complicated and unpredictable way, the plucking phenomenon is of doubtful value as an index".

For decisively overturning one of science's oldest unchallenged assumptions, Vonnegut won the 1997 Ig Nobel prize in the field of meteorology.

Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize