USIYPT Recruitment

First off, I bet you haven’t heard of the USIYPT. It’s no wonder: only 11 schools participated in it last year. But you should hear about it, since we are recruiting for our team next year.

The USIYPT stands for US Invitational Young Physicists Tournament. It’s a project-based competition: the organizer gives 4 problems, Each team solves at least 3 of them, and presents in-person on a competition day every year.

This year, the competition took place in The Nueva School, CA. One of the questions we dealt with is this:

Tuning Forks The frequency of a tuning fork can change, depending on the temperature or if it has been damaged in some way. Explore the physics of pristine, and damaged, tuning forks. Test your hypotheses experimentally, until you have a robust model of the workings of a tuning fork that is both qualitatively and quantitatively accurate.

To explore this instance, we bought 6 tuning forks, and recorded them sounding. We then made a model for each tuning fork using the solver function in Excel: the waves looks like this:

Then we damaged the forks by cutting them… And tested them experimentally too.

This year, we’re going to continue to do experiments as interesting as this, and we’re also going to investigate deeper into the theory related to the questions.

If you want to be a part of this, whether to help out, or to be a part of the presenting group, please contact Alison Leonard (aleonard@georgeschool.org), who organized this team.

Questions for next year:

Inelastic Magnetic Collisions

Magnetic dynamics carts are often used to show both elastic, and inelastic, collisions. While in the inelastic case the abutting magnets collide and stick together, in the elastic case they repel magnetically without touching.

Modify your school’s dynamics carts to collide inelastically without touching each other in the process. Clearly show that momentum is continuously conserved, and explain how the excess kinetic energy is dissipated.

The Surface of the Moon

Mountain heights, and crater depths, on the moon’s near side have been calculated since the 17th century. Now, anyone with a cell phone camera and a small telescope can photograph the moon to resolutions on the scale kilometers.

Image the moon using standard equipment, and make a three dimensional map of its surface.

Bouncing Drops of Water

When water drops bounce on a flat surface, symmetry suggests that they do not spin, but rather bounce and splash. However, when bouncing on a surface with an asymmetrical pattern, they can both bounce and spin.

Investigate the bouncing of water droplets both experimentally and physically.

Long Jumps with Weights

In Ancient Greece, athletes employed hand-held weights or halteres to extend the range of the standing long jump. In a brief 2002 article in Nature, Minetti & Ardigó found that archaeological halteres were in the mass range that optimized one potential benefit of the weights. The halteres may also have been hurled while the athlete was in flight.

Consider all the effects of hand-held weights in the standing long jump, where the goal is to optimize horizontal distance traveled in one leap before striking the ground, from both a theoretical and experimental basis.