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The 16 finalists of Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Junior Challenge have now been announced, and their creative videos are as fun and engaging as ever. Each has taken a complicated scientific topic and made it easy to understand in a video of up to two minutes.
The previous stage of the judging process, the Popular Vote, saw the top entrants’ videos generate excitement across social media as the public voted for their favourites. Having secured over 16,000 reactions to her video on social media, the Popular Vote winner, Lehnaaz Rana, has already secured a place in the final.
Now, the Selection Committee will choose the top five videos for final consideration alongside Lehnaaz’s. This champion will win three prizes: a $250,000 college scholarship, a science lab worth $150,000 for their school, and $50,000 for a teacher who encouraged them.
Here are three of the finalists with a chance of winning these prizes, plus the Regional Champion who collected more social media reactions on her video than any other entrant from Australia and New Zealand.
1. 17-Year-Old Lauren Park From the U.S.
In her video, Lauren explains Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem. She notes that, historically, mathematicians believed maths was complete and that they could prove all true statements from a set of axioms. Gödel went on to prove that this was not the case, shattering the belief that maths is complete.
2. 15-Year-Old Arabelle Elliot From the U.S.
Arabelle’s fun cartoon animation explains why the same note sounds different when played on different instruments. The talking ukulele in her video explains that the notes sound different because of overtones (or harmonics in maths).
Arabelle explains that the study of pitch and string tension in music influenced modern physics. This led to the standardisation of the harmonic series, creating equal temperament and leading to the phaseout of Pythagorean Tuning.
3. 17-Year-Old Emilie Efendy From the U.S.
In Emilie’s video, she explains that it took scientists nearly 50 years and the world’s biggest particle accelerator to produce a Higgs boson. Her clear diagrams show that particles get their mass based on how much they interact with the Higgs field. The stronger a particle’s interaction with the Higgs field, the stronger its mass.
She also explains that in 2012, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson. This discovery allowed scientists to extend research involving the search for dark matter, the identification of new particles, and our understanding of the Universe’s origins.
4. 17-Year-Old Tali Whiteridge From New Zealand
Tali’s video has the most reactions on Facebook and YouTube out of all entrants in New Zealand and Australia. She has been crowned the champion of this region.
In her video, Tali explores the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. She explains that subatomic particles can behave oddly. For example, an electron can behave like a wave and like a particle, making it impossible to know its exact location.
Tali’s animated “wheel of possibilities” represents all of the electron’s possible positions — the superposition of states. But not all positions are equal. When we extend the pattern, we can see that the possibilities are probabilities that form a wave. This wave shows how the odds of the electron’s location are distributed.
Tali then explores measurement — which forces the electron into a definite position — and the “measurement problem” that follows.
See more of the Breakthrough Junior Challenge finalists.
About Breakthrough Junior Challenge Co-Founder Yuri Milner
Yuri Milner isn’t just one of the Breakthrough Junior Challenge co-founders. He is also a co-founder of the Breakthrough Initiatives, a suite of programmes searching for signs of life beyond Earth, and the Breakthrough Prize, which celebrates scientists with the glitz and glamour that film stars are celebrated.
In addition to this, Yuri Milner has launched the philanthropic organisation Tech For Refugees, which connects refugees with the support they need to live more comfortably.
The Giving Pledge signatory is also the author of the short book Eureka Manifesto: The Mission for Our Civilization (2021).
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