<p>I’d say that you’re right. Most of the participants in science fairs that I’ve come across ‘did most of the work themselves’, but were basically number-crunching for the idea given by their mentors. You can tell: these are usually experimental projects, or involved some expensive apparatus that was housed in a university/lab.</p>
<p>So surely, not all have done the work solely by themselves.</p>
<p>But:</p>
<p>1 - Now, I’m a purist who prefers to do the theoretical work largely by myself, but I think that there’s nothing wrong with number-crunching. Research is a collaboration after all. Many of the best researchers might not have gone as far without their mentors: Bhargava, for instance, investigated Gauss’s composition law on recommendation by his mentor - who? Wiles. The late Halmos wrote an amusing account of his impression that a member of the faculty in his school came up with the idea where his doctoral advisees are told to work on cases n=2, n=3, n=4… of the same problem, like a PhD factory, until one of his students, a brilliant guy, got sick of the whole thing and decided to solve the generalized problem once and for all.</p>
<p>2 - It is a competition after all. So long as someone can demonstrate understanding of the topic, display rigor and consistency in the results, present findings in a succinct manner (and in the case of team submissions, show teamwork), produce a clear poster, he or she would already have scored well, because that’s how the competition is weighed. Difficulty of topic and ingenuity of ideas are of course, what we associate with the romantic idea of “research” - but unfortunately, you’re not going win even if you solved a century-old problem, submitted a preprint to arXiv, and refused to talk about it.</p>
<p>Moreover, you can’t write response papers, rank reports by citations etc. in a fair, so really, one should by no means expect it to be a perfect model.</p>
<p>If you had asked earlier, I would have suggested that you: try to make the best of what you have, start simple with what you’re told to do, then once you’re done, try to expand/deepen (the biology project); or stick true to your cause if you were really passionate about it (on proton decay)*.</p>
<p>Lastly, I know at least one person who did win the ISEF grand prize in Physics behind the backs of his high school teachers, because he also had radiation issues to account for. And I swear, he did everything from scratch at home… high voltage push-pull amplifier, ionization gauges, collecting hydrogen etc. (I don’t think many finalists have spent their summers visiting hospitals in the name of physics, trying to salvage oil diffusion pumps. But we’ve moved away from that.) The same person went on to put together a nuclear reactor with his friend in his dorm, a rather famous story (any UChic prefrosh here?).</p>
<p>Whatever the case, stomach your resentment, and I’m sure you’ll have a much better time ahead of you in Duke. And we might one day come across each other in a physics conference… who knows.</p>
<p><em>Postscript: I’m not accusing you of not being “passionate enough”, I say this because I myself wasn’t supported by my school for a similar project - they cited problems with radiation issues (which I had a 25 page appendix on mitigating). However, I did carry on with my project in my friend’s house, and while I was working on this project that was nearly doomed to fail, I was lucky to find a way to apply real analysis to an independent particle physics problem: it isn’t too complicated at all. I even heard that someone did a project on string topology a few years before I was in high school… kudos to him, that’s truly complicated. Also, I did do a project which began with beer foam *lol</em>, more exactly, two-phase flow modeling. The equations of motion for beer foaming are extremely complicated - it is also very difficult to approach the problem where the “beer” in midair pushes air into the cup of beer as you’re pouring it (entrainment flow). I don’t think it’s a good topic - but it’s fun.</p>
