Every year some of the world’s brightest 18 year olds get together to pit their wits against each other in the physics equivalent of the Olympic Games. The International Physics Olympiad involves teams of students from competing nations sitting gruelling exams in theory and lab work. This year’s competition was held at Leicester University in the UK for eight days in the middle of July and brought together over 300 students from 63 countries.

“It’s amazing to be here,” said one of the team from India, “because I’m one of only five people from the whole country. I was the only person to come from my city.”

Qualifying for one of the five places in each national team is not only a great source of pride but often guarantees students a place on a science or engineering degree course at a prestigious university. But it also involves beating off the competition of tens or, in some countries, hundreds of thousands of other students who take part in preliminary rounds.

“The competition is about individual endeavour,” says John Furniss, a member of the academic committee that was responsible for setting and marking the questions. “The spirit is that of the Olympics.” Gold, silver and bronze medals are awarded to those students who score a high enough fraction of the top mark, although no league table of countries is compiled.

This year, however, there was no doubt about which team finished top of the heap: China. All five team members were awarded gold medals and one of the team, Lu Ying, finished top overall. The Russian, Hungarian and Indian teams all picked up two gold medals and the Swiss, Bulgarian and Taiwanese groups each received one.

But success in the Olympiad is as much a sign of a country’s ability to train its students as it is of a healthy education system. Some nations take their brightest students away from mainstream education for several months and teach them nothing but physics for seven or eight hours a day for three days a week. Although the British students take part in a correspondence course to sharpen up their physics skills, their training is generally minimal compared with some other countries.

One of the smaller countries to have entered this year’s competition, Ireland, has relatively few students entering its national competition. “With our national exams we do not have time to prepare our students as thoroughly as we would like, and I think they find the competition very tough,” says Irish team leader Enda McGlynn of Dublin City University. “But they have always enjoyed it.” He also points out that many students, particularly in rural areas, often do not get the chance to use laboratory equipment themselves, and are restricted to watching their teacher carry out a demonstration. “It is a good experience for them to go into the lab and have to do it for themselves. It is an unusual experience for them, but I think it is very positive.”

Encouraging elitism?

Executive secretary of the Olympiad Cyril Isenberg believes that the competition is important because it encourages the very brightest students, and defends the event against charges of elitism. “In the UK at the moment there seems to be a system of not encouraging the best students, but instead putting all the emphasis on the average student. But it is going to be the brightest students who make important contributions in the future.”

This sentiment is supported by Martin Barstow, an astrophysicist at Leicester University and a member of the Olympiad organizing committee. “Our education system has recently worried less about the cleverest people, and, quite rightly, worried about the majority,” he says. “But there is a problem: what do you do with the really bright students? If you do not stretch them, you run the risk of them switching off and not fulfilling their potential. You have to recognize that if you are going to keep the education system broad for a long time, then eventually you have to channel [the more able] people into some kind of extra system like the Olympiad. There are many people taking part in this competition that may well be future Nobel-prize winners.”

When the Physics Olympiad started in Warsaw in 1967 only Eastern European countries competed, and there were fewer students than in the present competition. Organizing this year’s event was no mean feat, as Isenberg points out. “Try to imagine what it is like to feed, house and entertain over 650 people for a week,” he says.

Preparing the exams was a challenge, since these had to be translated into over 20 different languages. Each exam lasted five hours and certainly stretched the young physicists taking part, many of whom found the theory exam particularly difficult. In the practical exam, students had to carry out two experiments, one investigating the conductance of a light-dependent resistor and the other looking at the forces exerted on a puck when it slides down a slope.

But the week was not all about intellectual labour. The students also had an extensive social programme lined up for them and went on visits to London, Oxford, Cambridge and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. They also went on a trip to Alton Towers leisure park and experienced a simulated space mission at Leicester’s Challenger Learning Centre.

Bolstering physics

Despite the enthusiasm they have for physics, quite a number of the students at the Olympiad will not study physics at university. Four of the Indian team, for example, will go on to study computing. They say that the high wages and bright prospects mean that the computing industry in India provides a more secure future than physics research. And the level of education in computing is higher than that of physics, they add. “I would like to do physics,” says one, “but I would get frustrated because the standards are not very high.”

Many of the best students in Taiwan will not go on to study physics at university either, according to Pauchy Hwang of the National Taiwan University. “In the old days, almost all of the brightest students would go into physics,” he said, “but now the best students in Taiwan tend to go into things like medicine.”

But Hwang believes that the Olympiad has an impact in high-school education. “I think the Olympiad is a good way of getting kids interested in physics at an early stage.” This view is supported by Ming-Juey Lin of the National Taiwan Normal University and the leader of the Taiwan team. “We can use the material from the Olympiad not only to train the best students,” he says, “but also to train the high-school physics teachers, who will pass on what they have learned to their students.”