--- In quizbowl_at_y..., "Stephen Webb" <sdwebb91984_at_y...> wrote: > I was alluding more towards stuff that's so new and advanced most > undergrad science majors will have no clue. Example, how many people > here know enough about Clifford algebras and spinors/plexors to > answer a toss-up about them? There's a physics professor here at Tech > that loves these things, but that doesn't mean the average undergrad > will know it. The fact that you're the only person on the circuit who gets an erection from Clifford algebras doesn't prove that good current events questions on mathematics or science are impossible. There are plenty of fundamental objects whose natures are still being intensively studied, and a breakthrough in such study can certainly merit a question so long as the question rewards knowledge of the breakthrough but by the end requires only knowledge of the fundamental subject. My esteemed colleague Yuri noted a question of his citing current work whose answer was "thermodynamics" that precisely meets this criterion. From mathematics, I can without thinking hard suggest as possible answers where recent work might be cited as a clue the following; (3 or 4 dimensional) manifolds, the Poincare conjecture, diophantine equations, elliptic curves, Riemannian metrics and curvature, Hamiltonian dynamics, and homology, or even basic properties whose verification is often the content of fundamental theorems: compactness, connectedness, faithfulness, normality, associativity, closedness, or commutativity. These are things that can be the answer to a huge number of very different questions, and generating a much longer list of possible answers wouldn't be too hard. [If these are unfamiliar to you: I definitely wouldn't put questions with these answers in a high school packet, but I've seen most of them (usually without any "current events" content) answered in average-difficulty invitationals. If these are unfamiliar to you and you are Stephen Webb, I suggest that learning about them would be a better use of your time than plexors]. Anyone in a different branch of science should be able to spout a similar list relating to their own field. The constraint is not a lack of material but simply the energy needed to learn about interesting current work. As with almost every possible quiz bowl answer, there is a vast amount of information available that has never been asked about. To do so simply requires the writer to move beyond the most obvious sources, whether that be the canonical reference books or the New York Times science page (which would have informed you of Wiles' proof, but not about equally important developments in other areas of mathematics that lack the romantic history). It certainly takes effort to research a good question in a field that's not your own (and it's certainly true within science; besides math, science questions take me more time to write than anything else), but if someone's written a lame current events question or has omitted one entirely (*), it's because they didn't put in the time, not because such questions can't be written. David (*) I have no opinion regarding the importance of including science CE questions; ones that do not distinguish between someone who's read the title of a newspaper article and someone with an understanding of the area are clearly bad, but I don't have a strong view as to what percentage of good leadins should reference something that was discovered recently.
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