Crystal Trivia
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98 free Crystal trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This crystal trivia quiz covers crystals in every sense of the word: the science (what makes a solid a crystal, the seven crystal systems, quasicrystals, X-ray crystallography and the Nobel Prizes it won), the minerals (quartz and amethyst, halite, bismuth, diamonds, geodes and Herkimer 'diamonds'), the natural wonders (Mexico's Cave of the Crystals, snowflakes and the man who first photographed them) and the crystals people make and sell, from Swarovski and Waterford lead crystal to rock candy and the quartz oscillators inside your watch. It also takes in the folklore and the fakes: crystal balls and John Dee, crystal healing and what the studies found, and the crystal skulls that turned out to be 19th-century German work. Difficulty runs from easy questions anyone with a rock collection can answer to expert ones about crystallography and history. Every answer was checked against a reference page before publishing, so the dates, names and numbers hold up.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word crystal comes from the Ancient Greek krustallos, which meant both 'rock crystal' and what?
Ice
Ice: Pliny the Elder was sure rock crystal was a kind of ice, since it turned up only where winter snow froze hardest.
Q 02At the atomic level, what kind of material is lead crystal glassware?
Amorphous solids
Amorphous solids like glass lack a crystal lattice; the name comes from Venetian cristallo, glass made to resemble colourless rock crystal.
Q 03Which scientist tied crystals' shapes to their power to twist polarized light, proposing asymmetric molecules?
Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur then turned to fermentation, showing that living microbes cause it, work that gave us the word pasteurized.
Q 04Which symmetry can quasicrystals show that is impossible for an ordinary periodic crystal?
Five-fold
Five-fold symmetry was thought impossible in crystals, so once quasicrystals showed it, the IUCr rewrote its definition of a crystal in 1992.
Q 05Which mineral defines 1, the softest point on the Mohs hardness scale?
Talc
Talc is so soft and fine when crushed that it became talcum powder, long used in baby powders.
Q 06Whose 1669 study found that quartz crystals keep the same angles between faces whatever their size?
Nicolas Steno
Nicolas Steno soon gave up science for the Catholic Church, becoming a priest and then a bishop.
Q 07Amethyst gets its name from a Greek word meaning what?
Not intoxicated
Not intoxicated: the ancients believed the stone prevented drunkenness, so people wore amethyst while drinking to ward off wine's effects.
Q 08The Cave of the Crystals near Naica, Mexico, holds giant crystals of which mineral?
Selenite gypsum
Selenite gypsum beams over 10 metres long grew underwater; once the cave was drained, they risked cracking under their own weight.
Q 09Who discovered Mexico's giant Cave of the Crystals at Naica in 2000?
Two brothers drilling in the mine
Two brothers drilling in the mine broke into it; in its heat and humidity, researchers could stay only about ten minutes at a time.
Q 10Roughly how long did the Naica cave's giant crystals take to grow?
Hundreds of thousands of years
Hundreds of thousands of years: in water barely cooler than 58°C, they grew by about a sheet of paper's thickness every 200 years.
Q 11Rubies and sapphires are both crystals of which mineral?
Corundum
Corundum is so hard and scratch-resistant that lab-grown sapphire covers the windows of supermarket barcode scanners.
Q 12Guinness lists the largest snowflakes, 15 inches wide, as falling in 1887 at Fort Keogh in which state?
Montana
Montana's record rests on one rancher's unverified claim, and 15 inches lies far outside the normally documented range for snowflakes.
Q 13Wilson 'Snowflake' Bentley photographed his first snowflake in 1885 on his family farm in which state?
Vermont
Vermont farmer Bentley fitted a camera to a microscope and photographed over 5,000 snow crystals without finding two alike.
Q 21Swarovski built its crystal-cutting factory in which Austrian town for hydroelectric power?
Wattens
Wattens' hydroelectric power ran the cutting machine Daniel Swarovski had patented, turning crystal cutting into factory work.
Q 22Which Irish city's glassworks, founded in 1783, gave its name to one of the world's best-known crystal brands?
Waterford
Waterford's original glassworks, set up by George and William Penrose, closed in 1851, and the brand was revived only in 1947.
Q 23Which magazine's quip gave Joseph Paxton's 1851 Great Exhibition hall the nickname Crystal Palace?
Punch
Punch's Douglas Jerrold called Paxton's glass hall 'a palace of very crystal', and the nickname Crystal Palace stuck; the building moved to Sydenham in 1854 and burned down in November 1936.
Q 14Which physicist won the 1914 Nobel Prize for showing that crystals diffract X-rays?
Max von Laue
Max von Laue's gold Nobel medal was dissolved in acid in Copenhagen in 1940 to hide it from the Nazis; after the war, the gold was recovered and a new medal cast.
Q 15Which father-and-son pair shared the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics for their crystallography work?
The Braggs
The Braggs won while the son, aged 25, was serving in France, locating enemy guns from the sound of their firing.
Q 16X-ray studies showed which crystal is built of alternating ions rather than separate molecules?
Table salt
Table salt's sodium and chlorine atoms sit alternately, ionized rather than paired into molecules, which confirmed ionic bonding as a real type of chemical bond.
Q 17Photo 51, a famous 1952 X-ray diffraction image, revealed the shape of which molecule?
DNA
DNA's Photo 51, from Rosalind Franklin's X-ray work, was the pattern that let Watson and Crick reveal the double helix.
Q 18Which French siblings discovered piezoelectricity in 1880 using crystals such as quartz and tourmaline?
The Curies
The Curies' effect later became a vital tool when Marie Curie, Pierre's wife, measured faint currents from uranium rays on the way to discovering radium.
Q 19What shape is the quartz in most quartz watches?
A tuning fork
A tuning fork of quartz typically vibrates 32,768 times a second, a power of 2, so a chain of divide-by-2 circuits yields exactly one tick per second.
Q 20Where was the first quartz clock built in 1927?
Bell Labs
Bell Labs built its quartz clock while seeking steady frequency standards; by the 1940s, time-standard labs worldwide had switched from pendulums to quartz.
Q 24Which tool left the marks that exposed the British Museum's crystal skull as a fake?
A rotary wheel
A rotary wheel with abrasive left regular grooves, a technique pre-Columbian carvers, who worked with hand-held tools, almost certainly never used.
Q 25Which Elizabethan mathematician and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I is famous for scrying with crystals?
John Dee
John Dee, Elizabeth I's astrologer and mathematician, used a crystal ball and an obsidian mirror with his medium Edward Kelley to 'converse with angels'; both objects ended up in the British Museum.
Q 26What does scientific research say about crystal healing?
Its effects match a placebo
Christopher French's experiments with real and fake quartz found the same reported sensations whichever crystals volunteers held, so its effects match a placebo; crystal healing is classed as pseudoscience.
Q 27Which mineral is nicknamed fool's gold?
Pyrite
Pyrite struck against metal throws sparks, so some early firearms used it to fire the gun.
Q 28Most natural diamonds are how old?
1 to 3.5 billion years
Most natural diamonds, at 1 to 3.5 billion years old, predate the first land plants, so most cannot have come from compressed coal.
Q 29The Cullinan, the largest gem-quality rough diamond ever found, came from which present-day country?
South Africa
Found at South Africa's Premier Mine, the stone was bought by the Transvaal government, given to King Edward VII and cut into nine major stones.
Q 30Crunching which sweets in a dark room gives off tiny flashes of blue light?
Wintergreen mints
Wintergreen mints glow because crushed sugar crystals give off mostly ultraviolet light, which the wintergreen oil turns into visible blue.