Great Neck North High School Physics Team members Serena Chen, Julian Elihu, Aiden Jin and Nathan Zhong took third place out of 28 teams at the Yale Physics Olympics, held at Yale University on April 5.
The Yale Physics Olympics is comprised of five events. Participants only know one of the events in advance, so teams must be prepared to solve a wide range of physics-based challenges requiring multiple different steps and strategies.
In addition to achieving third place overall, North High won first place in the “Riemann’s Rectangle Reckoning” event for most accurately determining the area under a complicated curve.
The other four events were: “Fermi Quiz”, where teams had to estimate 15 different questions to the nearest power of 10; “Accelerate the Positive,” where students had to determine the fastest way to accelerate steel balls up a track using one, two or three
solenoids, a battery pack and a switch; “Not that Badtery” (spelling intended), which challenged students to build a battery with the strongest voltage using a salt water solution, paper towels, aluminum foil and carbon graphite powder; and “Weird Flex, But Okay,”
where students had to carefully measure the flex factor, closely related to the Young’s Modulus, of a thin plastic slab that can have various masses placed on it.
The faculty advisor for the North High Physics Team is science teacher Alan Schorn.
