Albert Einstein
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
96 free Albert Einstein trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
10 free Albert Einstein trivia questions with answers. How well do you know Albert Einstein? This trivia quiz features 10 challenging questions about the life, work, and legacy of the world's most famous physicist. From relativity theory to personal anecdotes, see how much you really know about Einstein's remarkable contributions to science.
30 of 96 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Albert Einstein born?
Ulm
Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg, was Albert Einstein's birthplace; the family moved to Munich the following year, where his father and uncle founded an electrical engineering firm.
Q 02Einstein's birthday falls on which annual celebration?
Pi Day
Pi Day is 14 March, written 3/14 in the US after the first digits of pi; Einstein was born on that date in 1879, and Princeton, his home for over twenty years, celebrates both together each year.
Q 03Einstein's delayed 1921 Nobel Prize was announced alongside which rival's 1922 prize?
Niels Bohr
Niels Bohr took the 1922 physics prize in the year Einstein's held-over 1921 award was finally made; the committee had judged no 1921 nominee to meet the criteria and reserved that prize for a year.
Q 04Taking a chair in Prague in 1911 required Einstein to accept citizenship of which empire?
Austro-Hungarian
Austro-Hungarian: Prague then lay in the Habsburg empire, and the chair at its German university was a state post tied to Austrian citizenship; Einstein stayed little more than a year before taking a chair back in Switzerland.
Q 05Which equation of Albert Einstein's says mass and energy are two forms of the same thing?
E=mc²
E=mc² came out of special relativity in 1905: energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, so a tiny mass holds enormous energy because c² is so large.
Q 06Whose 1666 'miracle year' is Einstein's 1905 often likened to?
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton, sent home when plague closed Cambridge, laid the groundwork for calculus, optics and gravitation around 1666; the Latin tag for such a year, annus mirabilis, was later borrowed for Einstein's 1905.
Q 07Why did Einstein never work on the atomic bomb project his 1939 letter helped launch?
He was denied security clearance
He was denied security clearance: in July 1940 the Army judged his pacifist leanings a security risk, so the man whose signature helped start the bomb project was shut out of it.
Q 08In which city did Albert Einstein take his first academic teaching post, as a Privatdozent in 1908?
Bern
Bern: in 1908 Einstein became a Privatdozent at the University of Bern, lecturing while still holding his day job there; in 1909 the University of Zurich made him an associate professor.
Q 09A stubborn myth says the schoolboy Einstein failed which subject?
Mathematics
Mathematics: shown a 1935 newspaper claim that he had failed it, Einstein laughed and replied that he had mastered differential and integral calculus before he was fifteen.
Q 10Einstein's 'miracle year' papers covered special relativity, Brownian motion, mass-energy equivalence and what else?
The photoelectric effect
The photoelectric effect paper, which explained light as discrete quanta, was the fourth miracle-year paper alongside special relativity, Brownian motion and mass–energy equivalence; general relativity only followed a decade later.
Q 11Unable to find a teaching job, Einstein became an assistant examiner in 1902 at what institution?
The Swiss Patent Office
The Swiss Patent Office took him on in June 1902 after his classmate Marcel Grossmann's father recommended him to its director; he wrote his great 1905 papers in his spare time around the job.
Q 12What ironic name did Einstein, Conrad Habicht and Maurice Solovine give their evening discussion club?
The Olympia Academy
The Olympia Academy was the three friends' mock-grand name for evenings arguing over Hume, Mach and Poincaré from 1902, usually in Einstein's flat; Habicht even gave him a mock-noble title as its 'president'.
Q 13Einstein's first wife, Mileva Marić, was of which ethnicity?
Q 21Einstein's four 'miracle year' papers were all published in which German journal?
Annalen der Physik
Annalen der Physik, the leading physics journal of the day, then edited by Paul Drude, printed all four papers; Einstein was no stranger to it, having published there since 1901 and written reviews for it.
Q 22Einstein's 1905 paper on Brownian motion compelled physicists to accept the existence of what?
Atoms
Atoms: Einstein showed that the jiggling of pollen-sized specks in water is just what bombardment by unseen particles would produce, and Jean Perrin's 1908 measurements matched his formula, ending serious doubt that atoms exist.
Q 23Special relativity reinterpreted the transformations named after which Dutch physicist?
Serbian
Serbian: Marić, born in 1875 to a Serbian family in Titel, then part of Hungary, was the only woman in Einstein's college class; his 1901 letter calling relative motion 'our work' still fuels debate over her part in his physics.
Q 14As part of his 1919 divorce settlement, Einstein promised Mileva Marić what?
Any future Nobel Prize money
Any future Nobel Prize money was pledged to Mileva in the 1919 settlement; when the prize came, the funds bought her three apartment houses in Zurich, the income supporting her and their sons.
Q 15What was Elsa Löwenthal to Einstein before she became his second wife?
She was his cousin
She was his cousin twice over, a first cousin through their mothers and a second cousin through their fathers; born Elsa Einstein, she ended up with her maiden name as her married name.
Q 16Whose observations of the 29 May 1919 solar eclipse confirmed Einstein's prediction that gravity bends light?
Arthur Eddington
Arthur Eddington led the Principe expedition; his plates showed starlight near the Sun deflected by roughly the 1.75 arcseconds general relativity predicted, twice the Newtonian figure, and the result made Einstein world-famous.
Q 17In 1933 Einstein took up a post he held until his death at which institution in Princeton, New Jersey?
The Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute for Advanced Study was still being set up when its founder, Abraham Flexner, visited Einstein's German summer house and won his promise to join; Einstein arrived in 1933 and never left.
Q 18In 1952 Einstein was offered, and declined, which largely ceremonial office?
President of Israel
President of Israel: after Chaim Weizmann died in November 1952, Ben-Gurion's government offered Einstein the presidency; he declined, saying he lacked the aptitude for dealing with people.
Q 19Einstein died in April 1955 from internal bleeding caused by what?
A ruptured aortic aneurysm
A ruptured aortic aneurysm, reinforced with cellophane by a surgeon in 1948, gave way in April 1955; Einstein refused further surgery and died at Princeton Hospital on 18 April.
Q 20The pathologist who took Einstein's brain kept most of it for decades in what?
Glass jars
Glass jars held the sliced brain for more than twenty years: Thomas Harvey kept the two of them in a cider box and took it with him from Princeton to Kansas, where a reporter tracked him down in 1978.
Hendrik Lorentz
Hendrik Lorentz had derived the Lorentz transformations by 1904 to explain the Michelson–Morley result; Einstein's special relativity derived them from two postulates, the relativity principle and the constancy of the speed of light.
Q 24General relativity explained a long-puzzling drift in the orbit of which planet?
Mercury
Mercury's orbit swings round the Sun slightly faster than older physics allowed, and astronomers had blamed an unseen planet they named Vulcan; Einstein's 1915 theory accounted for the gap with no extra planet.
Q 25Einstein signed the famous August 1939 letter to President Roosevelt, but which fellow émigré physicist drafted it?
Leo Szilard
Leo Szilard drafted it and Einstein signed on 2 August 1939; Einstein later told Linus Pauling that signing was the one great mistake of his life.
Q 26The 'Einstein–Rosen bridge' that Einstein and Nathan Rosen described in 1935 is better known as what?
A wormhole
A wormhole: working through general relativity's equations, the pair found a tunnel-like bridge joining two regions of spacetime; physicist John Wheeler later gave such bridges their catchier name.
Q 27With which Indian physicist did Einstein develop a form of quantum statistics bearing both their names?
Satyendra Nath Bose
Satyendra Nath Bose posted Einstein his 1924 paper on light quanta when it was not accepted for publication; Einstein translated it into German himself and got it printed, and particles obeying their statistics are now called bosons.
Q 28In 1999 Time magazine named Einstein its Person of the what?
Century
Century: Time's editors judged that the 1900s would be remembered above all for science and technology and made Einstein the symbol of its scientists; he had been a celebrity ever since the 1919 eclipse results.
Q 29Einstein famously summed up his objection to quantum theory in which phrase?
God does not play dice
'God does not play dice' is a paraphrase: in a 1926 letter to Max Born, Einstein granted that quantum mechanics 'says a lot' but added that he was convinced 'He is not playing at dice'.
Q 30Landing in Belgium in March 1933, what did Einstein do at Germany's diplomatic mission in Brussels?
Surrendered his passport
Surrendered his passport: after docking at Antwerp on 28 March 1933, Einstein handed it in at the German mission in Brussels and renounced his citizenship, then lived for months in the Belgian resort of De Haan.