Thailand hosts international physics competition

The five-member high school teams from China, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan each took home all gold medals from this year’s International Physics Olympiad, which was held 10–18 July in Bangkok, Thailand.

Taiwan’s Tzu-Ming Hsu was recognized for the best overall score, and competitors from China and Kazakhstan tied for best theoretical score. The Thai home team garnered three golds. A record 393 students from 84 countries participated this year.

The US team earned the fifth-best aggregate score. Brian Zhang of Palo Alto, California, and Ante Qu of Princeton Junction, New Jersey, each won golds. Lucy Chen of Ames, Iowa, Andrew Das Sarma of Silver Spring, Maryland, and Eric Spieglan of Naperville, Illinois, garnered silvers. US team expenses not paid by Thailand were covered by the American Institute of Physics, the American Association of Physics Teachers, and the American Physical Society.

The theoretical questions this year involved gravitational perturbations in a three-body system; electrified soap bubbles; and Rutherford scattering by a neutral, polarizable atom. Both experimental problems challenged participants to analyze black boxes. In one, the geometry of sliding capacitor plates had to be determined; in the other the location of a ball inside a tube had to be pinpointed by measuring pendulum behavior and the center of mass.

“The questions were simple and short, but at the same time quite demanding,” says Sirapat Pratontep, a lecturer at King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang in Bangkok, who, as a member of the olympiad’s academic committee, helped design the competition problems. The recent trend toward open-ended and less-guided problems continued, says US team coach Paul Stanley of Beloit College. “The experimental problems were 2 pages long as opposed to 20.” And although the average scores on labs were lower than with more structured exams, he says, the labs that require students to think more on their own “do a better job of distinguishing the good students from the phenomenal ones.”

Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn presided over the opening and closing ceremonies. She handed the students their medals—for which students had practiced bowing.

Next year’s olympiad will be held in Tallinn, Estonia.