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jkang wrote: That was a typo because the rules committee didn't properly record what suggestions the national proctor gave them for topics. Thus UDT was added to the rules as a possible topic. although it isn't actually a thing. Kinda dumb but it's a problem with the Science Olympiad organization in general rather than just one proctor or tournament in my opinion.

Wow... this one is totally on me. I'm personally responsible for those rules, and until I just read this message, I had no idea we put UDT in the printed rules. You know how sometimes when you look at a common word so much you just completely miss it's got an error in it? That's what's happened here. If you had asked me 10 minutes ago I would have sworn we put UTC in the list. Looking through my notes, I can see that UDT was in the original list going back to at least May 2015, so it just propagated forward from there, even though there were quite a few people that reviewed the rules during the summer and any one of us could have caught it. I'll see about pushing out a clarification regarding this.

Sorry that it caused you some concern, although to genius123's issue, everyone at NJ state's was in the same boat on this. All the teams had the same questions and thus the same opportunity to answer (most of which were likely wrong). I doubt it had an impact on who medaled or is going to Nationals.

We've posted a clarification to address the UDT issue: https://www.soinc.org/official_rules_clarif

Hi so I saw this question on a practice test and didn't quite understand how the got the answer that they had on the key. The answer they had was 3:30am but I got 12:20am. Can anyone help me?
Question:
A 12­hour clock reads 5:22 P.M. when it is actually 6:00 P.M., and it reads 7:34 P.M.
when it is actually 8:00 P.M.. At what time of day will this clock first be reading the
correct time? (4) (Answer in 12­hour time)

"An observer sees a light source accelerating away from him at a rate of

0.2c. Generally, what color does the observer see the light as?"

The answer is red.
This was written by the Liberal Arts and Science Academy, so all creds go to them. Though, I don't really know how to solve it (I assume something related to wavelength?)... help would be appreciated. Thank you!

mvxesque wrote:"An observer sees a light source accelerating away from him at a rate of

0.2c. Generally, what color does the observer see the light as?"

The answer is red.
This was written by the Liberal Arts and Science Academy, so all creds go to them. Though, I don't really know how to solve it (I assume something related to wavelength?)... help would be appreciated. Thank you!

Hey! I'm probably the one that wrote this question? So this question was made to test your understanding of relativity, specifically redshift. You can read more about it here and more generally here. The basic concept is that when moving at relativistic speeds, if a light source is moving away from the observer, the wavelength will shift so that the light will appear more red (and similarly blueshift, where if the light source is moving towards the observer, it will appear more blue).