50 Fun Facts About 11th Grade

Which phenomenon, where light above a threshold frequency frees electrons from metal, earned Einstein's 1921 Nobel?

The photoelectric effect, not relativity, is what Einstein's Nobel citation names, and Millikan got his own 1923 Nobel for measuring it.

How many prisoners were in the Bastille, already slated for demolition, when Parisians stormed it in July 1789?

Seven inmates, four forgers, two mentally ill men and a count jailed at his own family's request, were all the Bastille held that day.

Whose X-ray image of DNA, Photo 51, was shown to James Watson without her permission before the double-helix paper?

Rosalind Franklin's Photo 51 was actually taken by her student Raymond Gosling; Watson, Crick and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel for the structure, and she got none.

Which non-stick polymer was found by accident at DuPont in 1938, when a gas cylinder held a waxy white solid instead?

Teflon, which Roy Plunkett found when his gas cylinder had quietly polymerised, has one of the lowest coefficients of friction of any solid.

Which blood type is the universal red-cell donor, the one reached for in an emergency before the patient has been typed?

O negative is rationed: guidelines restrict it to O negative patients, women who might be pregnant and emergencies where typing is impracticable.

Which phenomenon, exploited by police speed radar, makes a passing siren slide from above its true pitch to below it?

The Doppler effect was proposed in 1842 to explain the coloured light of binary stars, and astronomers still use it to clock galaxies receding from us.

What Celsius temperature is absolute zero, where an ideal gas's pressure and volume both extrapolate to nothing?

−273.15 °C is also −459.67 °F, and Johann Heinrich Lambert got within about three degrees of it as early as 1779 using an air thermometer.

Which phenomenon of Earth's rotation deflects air to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and spins up hurricanes?

The Coriolis effect is far too weak to decide which way a bathtub drains; the idea that the hemispheres drain opposite ways has been repeatedly disproven.

Which 1953 Arthur Miller play about the Salem witch trials was written as an allegory for McCarthyism?

The Crucible won the 1953 Tony Award for Best Play, and Miller said its witch-hunt mirrored a US government persecuting people accused of being communists.

Which 1919 peace settlement's Article 231, the 'war guilt clause', made Germany accept blame for World War I?

The Treaty of Versailles was signed in the Hall of Mirrors, the room where the German Empire had been proclaimed in 1871, a venue Clemenceau chose deliberately.

Which noble gas did Neil Bartlett force into the first noble-gas compound in 1962, using platinum hexafluoride?

Xenon has almost the same first ionisation energy as oxygen, which tipped off Bartlett; the gas is now also used as an anaesthetic and in ion thrusters.

Which element, the most electronegative reactive element, combines with all others except the lightest noble gases?

Fluorine is so reactive that hydrogen explodes on contact with it, and even lamp-black carbon reacts with it at room temperature.

Which compound's synthesis from ammonium cyanate by Friedrich Wöhler is often called the start of organic chemistry?

Urea's synthesis is said to have toppled vitalism, the idea that organic matter carries a 'vital force', though historians now dispute that tidy story.

Which German chemist said a daydream of a snake seizing its own tail led him to the ring structure of benzene?

August Kekulé's former students won three of the first five Nobel Prizes in Chemistry: van 't Hoff in 1901, Fischer in 1902 and Baeyer in 1905.

Which French chemist's 1884 principle says raising the pressure on the Haber process shifts it toward ammonia?

Henry Le Chatelier's rule was found independently by Karl Ferdinand Braun in 1887, and it covers any stressed equilibrium, not just gases under pressure.

Which Austrian physicist's exclusion principle says no two electrons in an atom can share all four quantum numbers?

Wolfgang Pauli later extended the rule to every fermion with his 1940 spin–statistics theorem, and it is what packs electrons into shells one state at a time.

Which hydrogen isotope, with one proton and one neutron, forms the heavy water used to moderate nuclear reactors?

Deuterium makes up only about one in every 6,420 hydrogen atoms in seawater, yet it is used in most nuclear weapons and many fusion experiments.

What bond angle separates the four hydrogens around carbon in methane, the tetrahedral geometry of sp³ hybridisation?

109.5° is the tetrahedral angle, arccos(−1/3) or 109°28′ to the nearest minute, and Linus Pauling introduced hybridisation in 1931 precisely to explain methane's four identical bonds.

How many particles make one mole, a constant named after the Italian who tied a gas's volume to its molecule count?

6.022 × 10²³ has been an exact number by definition since 2019, when the mole was redefined as precisely 6.02214076 × 10²³ entities.

Which English polymath demonstrated light's wave nature by interference and also helped decipher the Rosetta Stone?

Thomas Young was also the first to describe astigmatism, in 1801, and proposed that colour vision rests on three kinds of receptor in the retina.

Which enzyme, probably the most abundant on Earth, fixes carbon dioxide in the Calvin cycle of photosynthesis?

RuBisCO is notoriously slow, fixing only 3–10 carbon dioxide molecules a second, so plants compensate by making it half their soluble leaf protein.

Which pathway converts glucose to pyruvate in the cytosol, the one stage of cellular respiration that needs no oxygen?

Glycolysis may predate life itself: its reactions can run without enzymes in oxygen-free conditions like the Archean oceans, catalysed by metal ions.

What phenotype ratio appears in the F2 generation when Mendel crossed two pea plants heterozygous for two traits?

9:3:3:1 breaks down as 9 showing both dominant traits, 3 and 3 with one each, and 1 in 16 recessive for both, but only if the two genes assort independently.

Which pancreatic hormone, made by the alpha cells of the islets, tells the liver to turn glycogen into glucose?

Glucagon is the body's main catabolic hormone, raising blood glucose and fatty acids, and it is also made by alpha cells in the stomach.

Which fatty sheath, laid down by Schwann cells, lets nerve signals jump between the nodes of Ranvier along an axon?

Myelin makes signals 'hop' by saltatory conduction, recharging at each node instead of travelling as a continuous wave, and each node is only about a micrometre long.

Which Swedish naturalist's 1753 Species Plantarum began modern botanical naming, with two Latin words per species?

Carl Linnaeus was ennobled in 1761 as Carl von Linné, and his campaign for mothers to breastfeed rather than hire wet nurses is thought to be why he coined Mammalia.

Which heat-stable enzyme, from a Yellowstone hot-spring bacterium, lets PCR run at high temperature unharmed?

Taq polymerase comes from Thermus aquaticus, first found in Yellowstone's Mushroom Spring, yet the park has never seen a cent of the PCR royalties.

Which gaseous plant hormone, used commercially to ripen fruit, is scrubbed from storerooms to keep produce fresh?

Ethylene is also the world's most-produced organic compound, over 225 million tonnes in 2022, much of it going into plastics such as polyethylene.

What escape velocity must an unpowered projectile reach at Earth's surface, ignoring air resistance, to never fall back?

11.2 km/s works out to 40,320 km/h, so anything actually reaching it low in the atmosphere would burn up from aerodynamic heating.

Kepler's third law ties the square of a planet's orbital period to which power of its orbit's semi-major axis?

The cube rule gives the same period-squared to axis-cubed ratio for every body orbiting the same primary, and Newton's gravitation reproduces it exactly.

Which rule, published in Hydrodynamica in 1738, says a fluid speeds up as it flows into a region of lower pressure?

Bernoulli's principle is the basis of the carburettor, whose narrow throat creates a low-pressure region that draws fuel into the incoming air.

Which 1834 law says a current induced by a changing magnetic field always opposes the change that produced it?

Lenz's law is why a magnet dropped down a copper pipe falls visibly slower than one dropped outside it: the currents it induces push back.

Which quantity, measured in newton-seconds, equals the change in an object's momentum when a force acts over time?

Impulse has the same dimensions as momentum, kg·m/s, and the idea underlies the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation linking a rocket's speed gain to its propellant ratio.

Which effect, kicking in past a critical angle of about 42° for glass to air, traps light inside an optical fibre?

Total internal reflection also erects the image in binoculars, via Porro prisms, and lets a fibre carry signals for kilometres with little loss.

Which Swiss mathematician introduced the notation f(x), the letter e for the natural-log base and i for √−1?

Leonhard Euler kept working after going almost totally blind, and is credited with about a quarter of the 18th century's output in maths, physics and astronomy.

What is the derivative of sin x, the first step in a cycle that returns to sin x after four differentiations?

cos x is what sin x becomes under one differentiation; go round four times and you are back where you started, with −sin x and −cos x in between.

How many people must be in a room before it is more likely than not that two of them share a birthday?

23 people give 253 possible pairs, and it is the pairs, not the people, that push the odds past 50%, to about 50.7%.

Which conic section, the path of a thrown ball, is the locus of points equidistant from a focus and a directrix?

The parabola's focus–directrix property was already noted by Pappus in antiquity, and Galileo showed a projectile traces one because gravity accelerates it uniformly.

Which Scottish mathematician published the first logarithm tables in 1614 and also popularised the decimal point?

John Napier also invented Napier's bones, an early calculating device, and his 1614 logarithm book ran to ninety pages of tables.

Which Mainz goldsmith's movable-type press completed a 42-line Bible in 1455, Europe's earliest major printed book?

Johannes Gutenberg's press was picked by Time Life in 1997 as the most important invention of the second millennium, yet his own birth year is unknown.

Which 1820 deal admitted Maine as a free state alongside a new slave state and barred slavery north of 36°30′?

The Missouri Compromise line at 36°30′ is close to where North and South split forty years later to fight the Civil War.

Which Babylonian king's law code, carved on a 2.25 m basalt stele in the Louvre, laid down 'an eye for an eye'?

Hammurabi's stele was dug up in 1901 not in Babylon but at Susa in Iran, where it had been carried off as plunder 600 years after it was made.

Which atmospheric layer holds the ozone layer, warms with altitude and is where airliners cruise at 9 to 12 km?

The stratosphere warms with height because ozone absorbs ultraviolet light, creating a temperature inversion; Concorde cruised inside it at about 18 km.

Which German meteorologist proposed continental drift after noticing the continents fit together like a jigsaw?

Alfred Wegener's idea was rejected by mainstream geology until the 1960s, when palaeomagnetism finally backed it and plate tectonics was born.

What did 18th-century sailors call the windless belt near the equator where the two trade winds converge?

The doldrums could strand a ship for weeks in the Age of Sail, which is the becalmed misery of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Which runaway slave, fleeing Miss Watson, rafts down the Mississippi with Huck in Mark Twain's 1884 novel?

Jim plans to reach Cairo, Illinois, where he can be free and then buy his family's freedom, and a 1955 CBS adaptation cut his character entirely.

In Shakespeare's Macbeth, which forest's apparent advance on Dunsinane Hill fulfils the witches' prophecy?

Birnam Wood 'moves' because Malcolm orders his soldiers to cut boughs and carry them as camouflage, so a prophecy Macbeth read as 'never' comes true.

Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men takes its title from which Scottish poet's 1785 poem about a ploughed-up mouse's nest?

Robert Burns's line 'The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley' replaced Steinbeck's original title once he read the poem.

Which SI unit of capacitance, one coulomb per volt, is so large that real capacitors are rated in millionths of it?

The farad is named after Michael Faraday, and values are usually quoted in microfarads, nanofarads and picofarads rather than whole farads.

What volume does one mole of any ideal gas occupy at 0 °C and 1 atm, be it hydrogen or carbon dioxide?

22.4 L is the 0 °C, 1 atm figure; at 25 °C and 1 bar the same mole of gas fills about 24.8 L, which is why two 'standard' values float around.