On 31 March – 2 April 2017 the Science Festival «Physics Days 2017» was held in Dubna. Young researchers from Dubna and other Russian cities gathered here for the fourth time. The main feature of our festival is that school students are not just spectators; they solve complex problems and carry out peculiar experiments, construct models on their own.

Each day of the Festival had its own subject. On Friday 31 March there was a robotics tournament. This year, participants faced a difficult task of constructing robots from the ground up: having received the assignment, they had just a few hours to make up, assemble and programme the construction to participate in the competition.

1 April is not only the Day of Laughter, but also an unofficial holiday for all mathematicians. School students were invited to «Mathematical Town». According to a legend, a ship with young mathematicians made a stop in a small town on the Volga. Having come ashore, the folks got surprised with a great number of unsolved problems in this beautiful town. The children had only a few hours to manage a traffic jam at the entrance to the tunnel, provide a ferry and build a new bridge. Young mathematicians coped with the set tasks, and most importantly, they were convinced that mathematics is exciting!

On Saturday, at one of the workshops, within 45 minutes, under the guidance of Yuri Bobrinev (gymnasium No. 1514, Moscow) students managed to assemble rockets that soared up for hundreds of meters above the Molodjozhnaya Polyana. Another group, together with Sergey Korolev and Ekaterina Luzina (FML No. 30, St. Petersburg), made and tested «soft landing» devices for fragile raw eggs dropped from a ten-meter height. Schoolchildren supervised by Ivan Lomachenkov, Danila Kozhevnikov (JINR University Centre, Physics and Mathematics Open Classroom, Dubna), and Ilya Danilin (school № 1392, Moscow), performed complicated laboratory research on hydrodynamics and ballistics. Younger participants with the help of Irina Glagoleva (center «Druzhba», Dubna) found out the application of physics to origami. Nadezhda Pleshakova (Dubna University) taught young chemists the secrets of cryptography. And the students of the Physics and Mathematics faculty with the lead of Irina Osipenkova revealed to the children the physics of magnetism.

The staff of JINR Museum of the History of Science and Technology conducted excursions for guests of the festival from other cities. The schoolchildren were told about the history of the Institute and its numerous achievements, and were introduced to the projects of future facilities. The guests particularly liked attending the «Laboratory class».

The final day of the festival was the most spectacular. The city concert hall «Mir» was transformed into one large laboratory where dozens of physical experiments were conducted. In some of them, young guests of the festival were directly involved. Children together with their parents were absolutely amazed and fascinated by spectacular demonstrations. The festival participants explained the principles of the experiments to amused spectators and answered their complicated questions.

This year, astrophysics made its debut at the festival. Children used real telescopes to «look for» exoplanets and learned a lot about astronomy and astronomical observations. The final chord of the festival was a fascinating demonstration of experiments with liquid nitrogen performed by JINR staff members Dmitry Dryablov and Anastasia Zlotnikova.

The festival «Physics Days» was organized by the JINR University Centre, Interschool Physics and Mathematics Open Classroom, JINR Museum of the History of Science and Technology and Blokhintsev Universal Library of JINR with the support of volunteers.

Mikhail Zhabitsky, Dzhelepov Laboratory of Nuclear Problems
Photo by Elena Puzynina, Elena Karpova