The International Physicists’ Tournament continues
The 11th edition of the International Physicists’ Tournament (IPT) came to end at EPFL in Switzerland in late April, with France represented by École polytechnique taking the winners Swiss fondue pot home! The IPT presents students with opportunities beyond just participating in a competition, from being able to travel to other countries, expanding their academic and social network to developing transferable skills which may not otherwise be developed during a typical undergraduate physics course.
The principles
For those unfamiliar with the IPT, the IPT is a tournament for undergraduate physics students to spend up to a year solving up 17 previously unreported problems in physics, both experimentally and theoretically (2019’s list can be viewed here). Students in their teams representing their nations then convene at a research-style conference where they will defend, challenge and review their findings with teams from other nations. Teams will go through various physics debates, in which teams are placed in threes and each team will hold one of the three roles: reporter, opponent and reviewer once. The reporter presents their solution on a given problem, the opposer then tries to find weak spots in the report and debates them on their solution. The reviewer then steps in to summarise and redirect the debate towards an improved solution of the reporter. A jury composed of academic researchers and teaching staff then grade each role between 1 and 10. Over a course of 4 physics fights, the top three then meet for a final duel for the title of Physics ‘world champion’!
Beyond the final
With the problems being unsolved and unreported in scientific literature, this opens up the opportunity for participants to write up their findings on the problems they have tackled even after the tournament has ended. Thanks to the launch of the spin off journal, Emergent Scientist (Em. Sci.), students can publish regardless of how novel and complete their solutions are https://emergent-scientist.edp-open.org/articles/emsci/full_html/2017/01/emsci170008s/emsci170008s.html.
For those of you interested in participating in the tournament next year or want to suggest a problem for participants to solve, you may contact the organising team at http://iptnet.info/contact/.
