50 Fun Facts About 11th Grade

Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics especially cited his discovery of the law of which effect?

The photoelectric effect, not relativity, is what Einstein's Nobel citation names, and Millikan won the 1923 Nobel partly for his work on it.

How many prisoners were inside the Bastille when Parisians stormed it in July 1789?

Seven inmates were all the Bastille held, and Lafayette later sent the fortress's main key to George Washington, whose Mount Vernon home still displays it.

Whose DNA research produced Photo 51, the X-ray image Maurice Wilkins showed James Watson before the double-helix paper?

Rosalind Franklin captured Photo 51 with her PhD student Raymond Gosling, but she died in 1958, four years before Watson, Crick and Wilkins won the Nobel.

Which polymer was discovered by accident at DuPont in 1938, when a gas cylinder turned out to hold a white solid?

Teflon's first job was in the Manhattan Project, coating valves and seals against corrosive uranium hexafluoride, years before non-stick pans.

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 the universal red-cell donor, but plasma rules run in reverse, so type AB is the universal plasma donor.

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 in 1845 musicians playing on a moving train were used to test it.

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

−273.15 °C is where classical physics said all motion stops, yet quantum theory says atoms still keep a jiggle called zero-point motion there.

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 steer a household sink or bathtub, where leftover motion in the water decides which way it swirls.

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

The Crucible's author was later found guilty of contempt of Congress himself, after refusing to give the House Un-American Activities Committee others' names.

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

Germany was barred from the Paris talks that wrote the Treaty of Versailles and took no part in negotiating its terms before signing.

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

Xenon was long filed among the 'inert' gases, yet since Bartlett's result chemists have made dozens of xenon compounds.

Which element is so reactive that it combines with every other element except the lightest noble gases?

Fluorine was first isolated in 1886 by Henri Moissan, who chilled his apparatus to slow the gas's attack on it, and the feat won him the 1906 Nobel Prize.

Which compound, until then known only from living bodies, did Friedrich Wöhler make from ammonium cyanate in 1828?

Urea from a flask let Wöhler boast to Berzelius that he could now make it without needing a kidney, whether of man or dog.

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

August Kekulé entered university meaning to study architecture, but Justus von Liebig's lectures in his first semester turned him to chemistry.

Which French chemist's 1884 principle predicts that raising the pressure in the Haber process yields more ammonia?

Henry Le Chatelier also studied the combustion of acetylene with oxygen, work that led to the oxyacetylene torch used in welding.

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

Wolfgang Pauli also proposed the neutrino, an uncharged particle he said must carry off the energy that seemed to vanish in radioactive beta decay.

Which hydrogen isotope forms the heavy water that moderates some nuclear reactors?

Deuterium was found in 1931 by distilling liquid hydrogen until the heavier atoms were concentrated, a discovery that won the 1934 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

According to VSEPR theory, what is the shape of a methane molecule?

Tetrahedral spacing puts methane's bonds 109.5° apart, the arrangement that keeps its four electron pairs as far from each other as possible.

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 was measured from the atom spacing in ultra-pure silicon spheres, and in 2019 the mole was redefined as exactly that many entities.

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

Thomas Young's wave evidence drew criticism at first, because it contradicted Isaac Newton's particle theory of light.

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

RuBisCO is so slow, fixing only a few carbon dioxide molecules a second, that plants make up for it by packing their chloroplasts with the enzyme.

Which stage of cellular respiration takes place in the cytosol and needs no oxygen?

Glycolysis may be older than life itself, since reactions resembling it can run without enzymes in iron-rich, oxygen-free water like the early oceans.

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 raises blood sugar by signalling the liver to release its stored sugar?

Glucagon is kept as an emergency shot that a friend or family member can inject when someone's blood sugar is so low they cannot take food by mouth.

Which layer, laid down by Schwann cells around peripheral axons, lets nerve signals jump between the nodes of Ranvier?

Myelin in the brain and spinal cord is what the immune system attacks in multiple sclerosis, slowing or blocking messages between the brain and the body.

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

Carl Linnaeus at first classed whales among the fishes, then moved them into the mammals in the 1758 edition of his Systema Naturae.

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

Taq polymerase made PCR practical, because earlier enzymes were destroyed by the heating step and had to be added fresh for every round.

Which plant hormone do commercial fruit-ripening rooms release as a gas to ripen fruit?

Ethylene leaking from old gas street lamps made nearby trees shed their leaves earlier than expected.

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

11.2 km/s is easier to reach launching eastward near the equator, where Earth's spin adds about 460 m/s, one reason many launch sites sit close to it.

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 came to Kepler in 1618, and he worked it into his book The Harmony of the World at the last minute.

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

Bernoulli's principle came from Daniel Bernoulli, whose father Johann allegedly backdated his own book Hydraulica to make it look as if the son had copied him.

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

Lenz's law is put to work in recycling plants, where currents induced by a strong magnet push back on metals such as aluminium cans and separate them from other rubbish.

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

Impulse is why car airbags save lives: they stretch out the time it takes to stop a passenger, so the same change in momentum comes with a much smaller force.

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

Total internal reflection is why diamonds sparkle: their critical angle is only about 24°, so light entering a cut stone struggles to escape except through certain facets.

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

Leonhard Euler went almost totally blind in later life, yet with scribes and his sons helping him his output did not fall.

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

cos x is the derivative of sin x only when angles are in radians; in degrees an extra constant creeps into the formula, which is why calculus uses radians.

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 is the path of a thrown ball, ignoring air resistance?

A parabola is the path Galileo worked out for projectiles, since gravity speeds their fall uniformly, yet his result stayed unpublished for more than 30 years.

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

John Napier's original logarithms were awkward to work with, and his exchanges with the English professor Henry Briggs led to base-10 logarithms instead.

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

Johannes Gutenberg lost his Bible workshop soon afterwards, when his investor Johann Fust called in the loans and took control of the press.

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

The Missouri Compromise was repealed by the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854, and three years later the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in the Dred Scott case.

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 and grows warmer with altitude?

The stratosphere can start as high as 20 km near the equator but as low as about 7 km at the poles in winter, so a jet cruising at 10 km may be inside it or still below it.

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

Alfred Wegener's idea was widely rejected, and he died on the Greenland ice cap in 1930, long before ocean-floor evidence brought continental drift back.

What do sailors call the windless belt near the equator where the two trade winds converge?

The doldrums are calm because the warm air there mostly rises instead of blowing across the sea, which can leave sailing ships becalmed for weeks.

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

Jim runs away after overhearing Miss Watson say she could get eight hundred dollars by selling him down the river to New Orleans.

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 poem says the best-laid plans of mice and men often go wrong, which suits Steinbeck's story of two drifters whose dream of a farm falls apart.

Which SI unit of capacitance is so large that everyday capacitors are rated in tiny fractions of it?

One farad is so big that two metal plates each a square metre in area, set a millimetre apart in air, reach only about nine billionths of it.

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 goes with the old 1 atm standard; since IUPAC moved standard pressure to 1 bar in 1982, a mole of ideal gas at 0 °C fills about 22.7 L instead.