History of Young Physicists' Tournament in Russia - The 1980 Article By Evgeny Yunosov

The 1980 Article By Evgeny Yunosov

In August 1980 Evgeny Yunosov has published an article titled "Young Physicists' Tournament" (Russian: Турнир юных физиков) in Kvant magazine (a popular Soviet science magazine for secondary school students, now available online). Yunosov has proposed the structure of a Physics Fight with teams having roles of Reporters, Opponents and Reviewers and was the first to underline that the suggested problems had no certain known answer and would make a problem even for a specialist. The 1980 article has determined the main features of YPT that remain milestones of the competition until today:

• "A Physics Fight is a collective competition of young physicists in their ability to solve complicated problems, to present their solutions in a convincing way, and to hold a discussion", wrote Yunosov in 1980.

• "Perhaps, the best scheme of a Physics Fight is if teams present themselves as Reporters, Opponents and Reviewers, in turn. At first, a representative of Reporter team presents their solution of a problem. Then, an Opponent poses questions to the reporter and announces his critical remarks. Naturally, that leads to a discussion. Finally a Reviewer evaluates the performances of both Reporter and Opponent", considered Yunosov.

• "In usual problem books, there are still no tasks of this type, and they would constitute a problem even for a specialist. However the life poses such problems to physicists daily. The jurors were very interested in seeing how students approached these problems, what qualitative explanation they proposed, what physical model they chose, what approximations they did, what experimental investigations they carried out, and in what way", underlined Yunosov.

• "The students were provided with the list of 17 problems", noted Yunosov in 1980, launching the tradition of 17 problems selected annually (however, this number was fixed only for the problems of the Correspondence Round, while other problem lists were somewhat flexible).