After the semifinals yesterday, the Grand Finale of IPT 2023 took place this morning, between 
Team Poland, 
Team IPT and Team France (Lyon)
The Finale started with three exciting introductory challenges (“Captains’ Fights”) to determine the order in which the teams would take the floor.
The first challenge was an “experimental” one: the participants were asked to hit a target the most precisely from a given distance with a bottle of sparkling drink, without shaking the bottle! The teams had two possible attempts each, and the task revealed to be harder than expected!
The second challenge was a theoretical one, in a very classical IPT style. The participants had two minutes to estimate the number of Tipp-Ex correcting fluid bottles necessary to erase all of the books in the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. The answers provided by the teams were amazingly accurate, since they estimated the number of bottles to be 10^9 (Team IPT), 3*10^8 (Team France – Lyon) and 9.7*10^7 (Team Poland), while the answer estimated by us was 3*10^8!
The third challenge was an experimental one: being given tape and three ecocups, the participants were asked to build the tallest tower in just six minutes. The trick was that the participants could not ask from cups from the other finalists, but they could implicitly ask the other teams!
Then the serious part really started, with presentation of problem #16 “Unstable levitation” by Team France (Lyon), followed by presentation of problem #2 “Singing ice” by Team IPT and finally presentation of problem #3 “Honey holding on to a spoon” by Team Poland. See this page for more information on the problems.
You can watch again the full streaming on our youtube channel:
After more than three hours of thrilling discussions and constructive debates, the Finale was over and everyone and a quick lunch before the Closing ceremony, with announcement of the final results.
An incredible twist!
This 15th edition of the International Physicists’ Tournament saw a very unusual turn of events with a tie for the first place!
For the very first time in the IPT history, two teams are sharing the first place: Team Poland and Team France (Lyon), with 46.33 points! Team IPT finished third with 40.83 points. Huge congratulations to the three teams for arriving at this stage of the competition, and of course to the winners!
The Tournament week is now almost over. We wish to congratulate again all the participants for making it to the international stage of the competition (let us recall that 22 teams registered, and only 18 could participate, in addition to the fact that some countries have national selections!) and for being part of the big IPT family.
We strongly believe the IPT is a life-defining experience and helps to make strong friendships in the Physics community. We encourage all students to join us for the next editions, either as participants, Team Leaders, Jurors, or… just fans!
IPT 2023 has been organized by the French Physical Society and Ecole polytechnique. We wish to sincerely thank all our generous sponsors, because IPT 2023 could not have happened without them:
