“Physics fights” are at the heart of the International Young Physicists’ Tournament, an annual competition in which high-school students debate selected physics topics.
In a physics fight, a reporting team leads with a discussion—on, say, what causes the noise when a drop of water hits a hot skillet—an opposing team questions the reporter’s arguments, and a third team reviews the first two. In the course of the tournament, teams take turns at the different roles. A jury of physicists judges the teams.
A list of 17 problems is published nearly a year before the annual tournament, which is held in July. The topics for the 2006 tournament include, for example, the propagation of sound in foam, the flight characteristics of a sheet of paper on a table, and the behavior of a stream of fluid when it strikes the surface of a sponge-like material. The full list of...
