Mercy Students take part in the Yale Physics Olympics

Fifty school teams from around Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York competed at the Yale Physics Olympics held Saturday, Oct. 19 on the Yale Campus.  Mercy High School’s team members are all members of the Class of 2014:  Grace Brodeur from Old Saybrook, CT;  Ashley Chase of East Hampton, CT;  Marinna Lorence of Rocky Hill, CT;  and Anna Snarski from Marlborough, CT. 

Since the autumn of 1998 the Department of Physics at Yale University has organized the annual Physics Olympics Competition. The theme of our event is "physics is fun!" It is run by Yale Physics professors who volunteer their time to get students excited about science.  The hope is that the participants enjoy themselves while applying basic ideas from physics in a practical context and hopefully learn some new physics during the day.  According to Marinna Lorence, “The professors were really informative and it was a truly great learning experience, especially with the Higgs particle.” 

The event takes the form of a pentathlon, performed by teams of four students, consisting of five 35-minute events. Each event is a task or simple experiment which the students perform as a term and for which they obtain a result or measurement.  “The Physics Olympics allowed our team to collaborate with each other as well as other teams.  I felt being one of the few all female teams gave us a different viewpoint on how to perform the unique five tasks, stated Anna Snarski.  It was fun, competitive and challenging according to Ashely Chase, “At the Physics Olympics I had the ability to work with teammates and to learn new concepts during the hands-on workshops.” Grace Brodeur commented, “I don’t think I would have had this experience anywhere else.  I’m very happy I participated.”   

The pentathlon was followed by explosive physics demonstrations or a lecture on "Yale and the Higgs"