Experiments: a bitter pill to swallow

08 Nov 2025 - 1121 words

Last updated 08 Nov 2025

If you’re in the US, the path to IPhO looks clear: pick up some physics textbooks and start studying, do lots of problems. This is literally all you need in order to qualify for the training camp. After you get there though, you’ll encounter something you might have never seen before: experiments.

Experiments? I did those in AP Physics C

There’s a world of difference between a typical experiment at IPhO and in your high school physics class. Experiments in a average physics class are designed to be within the capabilities of everyone in the classroom, and to last the length of a class period. The data you record doesn’t really matter; everyone has an amusing anecdote about getting 1000% error on a lab. The main difficulty is usually being able to follow instructions.

Now, let’s look at the EuPhO 2024 experiment. You start off with a jumble of equipment. First we have a multimeter with clips, wires, a capacitor, and a battery, fairly standard. A scale, stopwatch and ruler, as expected. Then we have…two small elastic balls? And some wooden thing with leads attached to it, which apparently has a crystal inside.

What’s our first task? “Determine the fraction of kinetic energy lost by the ball during a collision with a solid surface.” No other instructions, but it isn’t too hard to think of a procedure of doing this—just drop the ball from some height and see how high it goes back up. Our next task is…worth half of the experiment? And has four subparts. First subpart: measuring the capacitance of the capacitor. Wait, this multimeter can’t measure capacitance? How are we supposed to do this?

Here it takes a little bit more thinking. It turns out that the multimeter has an internal resistance inside, which is helpfully specified by the experiment document. If we first charge the capacitor with the battery, and then connect it to the multimeter, we can see the voltage decrease in real time, and measure the capacitance from that.

Triumphant, we look at the next subpart. Now we’re supposed to measure the capacitance of the piezo? Easy, we’ll just do the same thing! Upon doing so, we discover that the voltage drops too fast for us to get a reliable measurement. Uh oh. The solution now is to wire up a circuit that puts the piezo in parallel (or series, I forgot) with the capacitor we had earlier, and measure the capacitance indirectly this way. Remember, you have to do all of this with alligator clamps and tiny little wires.

We’re now onto the third subpart. So, the property of a piezo is that it develops a voltage depending on how hard you press on it. We’re now supposed to measure and plot this dependence. Now we have to think of some procedure for doing this, but how? We’ve already spent a lot of time to get to this point. The good news is that the experiment lasts 5 hours, so there’s plenty of time to dwell on things.

I won’t belabor you with the rest of the experiment. The point is, there’s no handholding. Furthermore, it requires serious dexterity with your hands. For example, if you’ve never played with circuits it’s easy to waste a lot of time failing to wire things together properly. Finally, there will be a lot of times where you’ll have absolutely no clue what’s supposed to be happening. ¹ Navigating this well requires you to have some sort of intuition for this sort of spatial, hands on work. You need to have instinct for what sorts of procedures are likely to work, and which are likely to be flawed. When things are awry, you need to be able to take a step back and come up with a reason why, and then to change your approach to avoid it. Developing these skills usually requires many, many hours in the lab.

Most campers lack these skills

From our scores on the USAPhO you might think that most campers are good at physics. No! We’re good at solving problems on paper. If you meet the coaches, they’ll be happy to tell you tales of trainwrecks in the lab. If you look at IPhO results, most of our team members do very well on theory, but have some of the lowest experimental scores. So why are we so bad at experiments?

In my opinion, it’s because of how practical skills have become devalued over the past decades. This mostly reflects how physical labor is less emphasized these days, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it means that there’s no longer an expectation of basic competency with working with your hands. The average high school student will take two classes that even have labs at all. The only people who have the opportunity to develop practical skills are the ones who do things like robotics, circuitry, and other general tinkering. Everyone else will have essentially zero experience.

For most people, it won’t even occur to them that they need to be good at experiments for physics olympiads. ² By the time you arrive at training camp, you just can’t improve enough in two months before the IPhO for it to make a meaningful difference. The coaches are aware of this. At least in my perception, they’ve shifted the labs used for team selection so that they aren’t useful at all for learning, but are intended to be pure assessments of skill. So once you arrive at camp, there’s not much you can do to change whether you’ll be on the team or not.

I can’t really complain, since this is probably what’s best for the IPhO team. Mainly, I realized all of this the hard way my second time around. I knew that experimental skills would be very important, and I knew my performance from the previous year. If I had really taken preparing for the IPhO seriously, I would have trained much more intensely on experiments than on theory.

Fun fact, on the actual exam I got to where I just described, and tried some half baked procedure for measuring the voltage. Then I broke my brain over how the piezo failed to give me any consistent results for the next four hours. I have no clue what went wrong, but that’s how I got the lowest experimental score on the US team! ↩
Indeed, I didn’t know the training camp would test us on our experimental skills until I literally got there for the first time. ↩