SoTS Physics Lyceum
An extracurricular, multi-year physics school where students in grades 7–12 develop the kind of deep reasoning professional physicists use.
Taught and guided by professional scientists · Online worldwide · In person in Princeton
theory · demanding problems · student-designed experiments · scientific discussion · original research
The Ultimate Physics Path
Start with courses at the right level. Add original research at any stage.
Your own project, in whichever lab fits what you want to study: Environmental Physics, Physics of Video Games, Acoustics and Perception, Optics and Perception, AI Meets Physics, Data-Driven Astronomy, Physics Tournament, Physics of Everyday Phenomena.
How the Lyceum Works
The Lyceum follows physics itself, not AP exams. Expert physicists design, teach, and grade the courses to clear, no-inflation standards. Students reason from first principles, solve demanding problems, explain ideas aloud, and critique one another’s work.
In middle-school and high-school classical courses, students plan experimental procedures together, run the experiments at home, and discuss their results in class. The Lyceum provides the equipment, handing it to in-person students and shipping it to online students.
In Research Labs, every student takes an original research question from first idea to final findings: defining the question, choosing a method, collecting or obtaining data, analyzing results, and presenting and defending the work within a research group built for cross-pollination of ideas and methods.
What Students Build
Students build physics intuition they can use on unfamiliar problems, not a list of memorized formulas. They learn to reason from first principles, make and test predictions, examine assumptions, and defend their conclusions.
That foundation transfers:
- University physics. Students enter advanced physics already comfortable building models, connecting concepts, examining assumptions, and reasoning from first principles. Calculus becomes a tool applied to physics they understand, rather than a substitute for understanding.
- Research work. Deriving results, checking limits, testing assumptions, designing investigations, and defending conclusions are core habits of quantitative research.
- Fields beyond physics. Engineering, computer science, biology, finance, and machine learning all require students to model real systems, evaluate evidence, and distinguish a meaningful explanation from a pattern in the data.
Certificates and Transcripts
Every student receives a cumulative transcript. Passed courses and completed research semesters earn certificates; full program paths lead to Certificates of Mastery. See the complete credential structure for requirements.