Some notes on the United States Physics Team

David Liao

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Applying
3. Preparing
4. The Camp
5. Copyright

Introduction | Top

Dear physics student at Piedmont Hills High School,

I invite you to look into the United States Physics Team. It's a lot of fun. Team members learn all sorts of college physics that is not covered in the AP Physics B and C tests. Each day is filled with hours of theoretical paper tests and "Mystery Labs." If you like playing with delicate and potentially expensive instrumentation without the instruction manual, then this is the camp for you. So how do you get there?

Applying | Top

You take physics B and C at Piedmont Hills High School. During your second year it is a good idea to look up the Physics C curriculum in the school files or online so that you can practice planning your own book-reading, homework sets, and examination schedule.

While calculus can be extremely helpful, the International Physics Olympiad rules require that all test problems be solvable by a non-calculus method. It could be helpful to try out for the team during Physics B; semi-finalists are now recognized on the AAPT website. Whenever you choose to apply, your physics teacher will help you fill out an application that can be found somewhere on the American Association of Physics Teachers website. In the past the teacher has asked the school to pay the $20 ($10 per additional student) application fee. It would be very polite of you to fill out the form yourself so that your teacher does not have to interrogate your family for assistance :).

The 24 members of the physics team are chosen every year through two tests: a two-part multiple-choice and free-response preliminary exam and a two-part free-response semi-final exam. The Physics Bowl can give you some taste of a competitive multiple-choice test, but you need to practice taking the past screening exams available on the AAPT website. Besides the familiarizing yourself with the free response, you need to get used to working with problems that are harder than standard AP problems. It is helpful to understand that the team motto, Entia non multiplicanda sunt praeter necessitatem translates (very) loosely to "Keep it simple stupid." Particularly in the multiple-choice problems, extensive calculation can often be avoided by a clever insight (it makes you feel like Obi-Wan Kenobi or some Zen person if you do it correctly). The GRE (from the same people who bring us the SAT and the AP tests, uck) in physics works on a similar principle.

Remember that you have only a few exams available, so do not look at them until you are ready to simulate exam conditions. Then think about what went well or did not go well, and think about ways to improve.

If you make it to semi-finals, your teacher will be asked to write a letter of recommendation. It is very polite to provide a curriculum vitae (it's like a resume, but for academic crud) including relevant research or independent work. For example I amused myself after school by designing and performing simple lab experiments to study the rainbow observed from behind a diffraction grating or the parabolic profile of a spinning fluid; it was helpful that my teacher knew about this. Some people also work in the summer at research firms or laboratories; this would be very good to include. Keep all this stuff after the application process; it can be very useful for college admissions.

Finally, during all exams remember that it is ok if these exams are significantly harder than anything you have done before. They're supposed to be. It is completely ok if you didn't get in. If you had healthy self-awareness before, then whether you get in or not should not significantly change who you think you are.

Preparing (if you got in) | Top

Oh my gosh you got in!!! Scream and run around happy; ok now collect yourself. You will need to do the following.

• Check your schedule for conflicting events (like other Olympiads). Your parents would probably like to be notified about your travel plans. If all is well, fill out the "Yes, I will participate" form and send it in quickly (that's polite too).
• Do you have a United States passport? This is required at the camp because someone thought s/he knew what a passport was and they did not realize that s/he didn't know until s/he had already made it to the traveling team. Getting him/her out of the country was kind of dicey.

Logistics aside, it is now important to prepare. While your Physics AP curriculum covers many topics, there are a few that will show up at the camp. Your mailing includes a syllabus (I forget--it might have had practice problems too--do those now!)

• Thermodynamics-to the point that you understand what the constant gamma does
• Circuit diagrams-highly symmetric 3-D circuits collapse into a single effective resistor very quickly with practically no written calculation if you do them right; I have already forgotten this because it's one of those things you never see in real life :)
• Special Relativity-not hard
• Particle physics-be familiar with stuff like impact parameters. You might find it helpful to look at a really introductory modern physics book like Sanny's University Physics vol. 3.

And now, the one subject that falls through the AP curriculum almost completely, laboratory technique. I'm not talking about being careful and not spilling everything. Download the error analysis cheat sheet from this directory. It summarizes some concepts you will appreciate not having to learn the first night you arrive at the hotel, and it is one of the stumbling blocks that kills people in college laboratory (which is really quite a shame because it's simple--it's one of those things people learn to be afraid of so that they never find out that it's easy).

The Camp | Top

I will avoid giving away secrets, but here are some fun non-testing activities we did in 2001.

• Listen to Nobel prize speaker; play with liquid nitrogen--always fun
• Late at night, a friend and I listened while another teammate taught us to derive the Lorentz transforms from a few thought experiments
• Visited the Greenbelt NASA facility and looked at data coming in from SOHO--WOW!!!
• Team coordinators had pulled out a TV for us to watch movie rentals the last few hours before the recognition ceremony; we popped the international hotel video in and learned
  1. Vacuum from the inside corner toward the door
  2. Pinch the corners of a pillow when trying to put on a new cover
  3. Hotel towels are color coded. I think white is dry and blue is wet. Pink is for the toilet, so I'm never touching a pink towel if I see one on the ground.

Remember to have fun and get sleep. Focus on improvement, and you have not an excuse to be distracted by rankings. You don't get rankings, and everyone at the camp is already a US Physics Team member. This is very good practice for college psychological endurance.

Good luck!

David Liao, USA 2001

Copyright | Top

Copyright © 2004 David Liao.

Created 2005 January 04.