Day two, and Taiwan again. The previous day I had been brought in as a non-voting observer — the intent was to get me to work straight away, but I pushed back: I needed more floor time first, and so I continued in the trainee role a little longer. On day two I was paired with Taiwan, Pakistan, and Greece for Round 2.
The Accent Problem
Physics judging is also, inevitably, a language exercise. Taiwan's English was the clearest of the three — I could follow without difficulty. The other two teams presented in accents that required active effort to parse: one with the characteristic South Asian inflection, the other with a Mediterranean quality that I can only describe as brined. Both were intelligible, but the cognitive overhead was real.
The round itself was largely uneventful until the final exchange, when Pakistan's team produced a chain of Lagrangian equations that looked impressive on the slide but turned out to have the energy terms wrong. The other teams failed to call it out clearly, which allowed the scores to compress — everyone got pushed down together. The lesson is clear: when a report contains nonsense, you have to be direct about it, not polite.
Promoted
After the morning session I was promoted to full judge. The process of sitting in and scoring — even in a non-voting capacity — is genuinely educational. The competition's design rewards specific things, and those things are not always what people preparing at home assume they are. The scoring logic has real thought behind it.
The Nobel Lecture
The afternoon belonged to Ferenc Krausz, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for attosecond science. He spoke for just over an hour. The outline, as I understood it:
- Inspiration: you should benefit humanity — the standard opening
- History: how the giants of atomic physics worked (Rutherford, Bohr, Schrödinger, de Broglie)
- Substance: how attosecond-scale measurement actually works
- Pitch: his current biophysics research and its applications
It was clarifying in a specific way. Watching Krausz work an audience, I finally understood what a good scientific talk is supposed to do: give the lay audience emotional resonance; give the partially informed audience intellectual recognition; give the insiders something genuinely new; and give the would-be collaborators a clear enough picture to see where they might fit in. He hit all four layers without losing anyone. That is the actual standard.
Buda Castle and Fisherman's Bastion
After the lecture, a group of us went up to Buda Castle and the Fisherman's Bastion. The location is good — worth returning to properly. Budapest rewards more time than a conference schedule allows.