The World's Fair

What began as a field of 64 highly competitive teams has ended with just Darwin and HIV. With the tournament's Final game currently underway, we look back on a Science Showdown like no other. Some of the best play in the early rounds came from the Physics, or Orbit, Region. Chad Orzel, of Uncertain Principles, caught all the action.

It all began with this...

Anchor 1 (voiceover): The Showdown begins! Four regions, eight games each, sixty-four top science concepts in a fight to the finish.

Anchor 2: In today's Orbit region action, two titans of Newtonian physics collide-- will Universal Gravitation maintain its orbit, or will the upstart Second Law change its momentum for the worse?

Anchor 1: Quaternions. Euler angles. Which is which, and what does their exciting clash mean for the future of physics? We'll find out what Dick Vitale thinks.

Anchor 2: And you won't believe the controversial finish of the match between dark and ordinary matter. The upset of the epoch turns on a referee's decision-- just what happened in the Fritz Zwicky Memorial Arena? We'll explain it all for you.

Anchor 1: All that, plus Mel Kiper on next month's NFL draft. Coming up right now-- this.... is ScienceCenter!

(The theme music reaches its climax. The graphics swirl dramatically. Highlights strobe past at a speed that causes seizures in rats. The title graphic splashes across the screen, then we fade up on two anchors in the studio)

Anchor 1: Good evening, and welcome to ScienceCenter. An exciting day today in the Science Showdown brackets. Albert Einstein's two best-known theories collide in a match for the ages, and the long-awaited rematch between Bosons and Fermions lived up to its billing.

You can find the rest here.

But then don't neglect the pregame chatter, here.