The Finale started with three exciting introductory challenges (“Captains’ Fights”) to determine the order in which the teams would take the floor.

The first challenge was an “experimental” one: the participants were asked to hit a target the most precisely from a given distance with a bottle of sparkling drink, without shaking the bottle! The teams had two possible attempts each, and the task revealed to be more challenging than expected!

The second challenge was a theoretical one, in a very classical IPT style. The participants had two minutes to estimate the number of Tipp-Ex correcting fluid bottles necessary to erase all of the books in the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. The answers provided by the teams were amazingly accurate, since they estimated the number of bottles to be 10^9 (Team IPT), 3*10^8 (Team France – Lyon) and 9.7*10^7 (Team Poland), while the answer estimated by us was 3*10^8!

The third challenge was an experimental one: being given tape and three ecocups, the participants were asked to build the tallest tower in just six minutes. The trick was that the participants could not ask from cups from the other finalists, but they could implicitly ask the other teams!

Then the serious part really started, with presentation of problem #16 “Unstable levitation” by Team France (Lyon), followed by presentation of problem #2 “Singing ice” by Team IPT and finally presentation of problem #3 “Honey holding on to a spoon” by Team Poland. See this page for more information on the problems.

You can watch again the full streaming on Youtube.

An incredible twist!

This 15th edition of the International Physicists’ Tournament saw a very unusual turn of events with a tie for the first place!

For the very first time in IPT history, two teams are sharing first place: Team Poland and Team France (Lyon), with 46.33 points! Team IPT finished third with 40.83 points. Huge congratulations to the three teams for arriving at this stage of the competition, and of course to the winners!

Source: IPT