International Physicists’ Tournament

For a few years now, I have formed and coached teams of our students participating in the International Physicists’ Tournament, and its french pre-selection tournament, the French Physicists’ Tournament.

The tournament is preceded by a preparation phase, where the students have to study more than ten different problems experimentally, and study the physics at work. The tournament itself consists in two days of “physics fights”, in which teams present, criticise and discuss each others findings (more on the principles of IPT here). It’s captivating, and actually rather close to the scientific method of observation / mathematical modelling / disputatio that professional researchers follow. It is therefore only plausible that occasionally this research-for-fun yields results original enough to warrant a publication in a scientific journal. See the page with publications by our teams.

See the pages for the different editions to know who was on Université Paris Cité’s team. I plan to post nice images of our experiments as well, but please be patient…

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Last modified: 26 Aug 2026