American Physicists' Tournament

December 5th, 2020

During quarantine, the tournament format was changed. Despite the difficulties of virtual events, students from UW Seattle and UC Berkeley came together for a day of intriguing physical phenomena, insights, and new friendships!!

Results

1. UC Berkeley (81.225): Bingxu Meng, Miguel Ceja, Shantanu Kadam*, Siddhant Mal, Vivian Gao (String Bean Theorists)
2. UW Seattle (73.4811925): Adit Jain, Bowen Dang, Gonzalo Ferrandez, Levi Rhoden, Liam Bonds*, Riley Maloney (Zoom Laboratories)

* = team captain

	Reporter Points	Opposer Points
Physics Fight 1
UW Seattle	27	13.5
UC Berkeley	24.75	19
Physics Fight 2
UW Seattle	19.2311925	13.75
UC Berkeley	19.5	17.975

You can find recordings of the fights on YouTube.

Awards

Best Reporter: Liam Bonds (Problem 12, mean judge score: 9/10)

Best Opposer: Shantanu Kadam (Problem 12, mean judge score: 9.5/10)

Acknowledgments

Thank you to these grad students, postdocs, professors, and scientists for sharing their time and critiques with us by judging solutions! Their comments and questions enriched the scientific discourse immensely!

Volkar Koch***, Viktoriia Baibakova**, Nikolai Semenov, Aini Xu, Nicholas Rapidis, Jyotirmai Singh, Jaime Zendejas, Anthony Khodanian, Nicholas Rui, Guillaume Shippee

Asterisks = number of (consecutive) years as judge!

Big big shoutout to these amazing individuals for moderating the tournament! Their insistence on time-keeping heightened the importance of concise scientific discussion!

Erika Hathaway, Wendy Wan

And of course, where would we be without the SPS officers who organized the entire event? Transitioning to a virtual event wasn’t easy, but they eagerly jumped to it!

Shantanu Kadam, Siddhant Mal