Enrico Fermi Trivia
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60 free Enrico Fermi trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Enrico Fermi trivia quiz covers the last physicist who was equally at home at the blackboard and the workbench. The easy questions handle the reactor under the stadium, the Nobel Prize, the neutrino, fermions and the paradox about aliens. From there it moves through the life: the market-stall physics book, the mentor who tested him with geometry, the Pisa pranks, the doctorate at 20, the Rome group with a street for a nickname and the racial laws that sent him to New York straight from Stockholm. The harder end covers the elements he thought he had discovered, the chemist who suggested otherwise, the paraffin and the wooden table, the Navy's $1,500, the coded phone call about the Italian navigator, the xenon that shut down Hanford, the strips of paper at Trinity, the report against the hydrogen bomb and the test debris that gave us fermium. Every answer was checked against Fermi's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our physics and Manhattan Project quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Italian wine did Eugene Wigner open to toast the first chain reaction at Chicago Pile-1?
Chianti
Chianti: Wigner produced the bottle once the pile had gone critical on 2 December 1942, and the scientists drank it from paper cups and then signed the bottle as a keepsake.
Q 02Fermi's family left Italy for good in December 1938 by travelling first to which city?
Stockholm
Stockholm, where he collected the Nobel Prize in Physics: the trip was the family's way out, and instead of returning from the ceremony they emigrated, so that Fermi did not see Italy again until 1949.
Q 03Which workers in Chicago are counted in the classic estimation puzzle credited to Fermi?
Piano tuners
Piano tuners: the solver reasons from the city's population to its pianos and how many one tuner can service in a year, landing within a small factor of the truth, and such rough reckonings are still called Fermi problems.
Q 04Before the Trinity test, Fermi offered bets on whether the blast would destroy the whole planet or merely which state?
New Mexico
New Mexico: his gallows-humour wager began with whether the explosion would ignite the atmosphere, a danger the project's theorists had already calculated to be all but impossible.
Q 05Which close relative of Fermi died suddenly in 1915 during a minor throat operation?
His brother
His brother, a year older and his partner in building electric motors, died during the operation; the grieving boy turned to physics books and to a new friend, Enrico Persico, who also became a physicist.
Q 06The 1840 physics treatise by a Jesuit priest that the teenage Fermi taught himself from was written in which language?
Latin
Latin: Andrea Caraffa's two-volume treatise was one of the secondhand books Fermi bought, and by teaching himself from them he reached the level of an advanced graduate student before leaving high school.
Q 07Which brilliant young theorist from Fermi's Rome group vanished in March 1938?
Ettore Majorana
Ettore Majorana is said to have withdrawn his savings shortly beforehand; what became of him is still disputed, and his family never believed that he had taken his own life.
Q 08Fermi attended the Scuola Normale Superiore in which Italian city?
Pisa
Pisa: his entrance essay was so advanced that the examiner called him in to say he would become a famous scientist, and before long it was Fermi who was teaching his professors the new quantum physics.
Q 09Which British physicist independently reached Fermi's quantum statistics months later, so that they now carry both names?
Paul Dirac
Paul Dirac found the same rules a few months after Fermi's 1926 paper and tied them to the new quantum mechanics; they went on to explain how electrons carry current through metals.
Q 10Which fellow physics student at university became Fermi's close friend and later his chief assistant in Rome?
Franco Rasetti
Franco Rasetti did not follow Fermi into weapons work: he refused on moral grounds to join the Manhattan Project, in which his old friend played a leading part.
Q 11Fermi's 1922 doctorate rested on experiments with which kind of radiation?
X-rays
X-rays: he was already publishing theory, but Italy did not yet have a single chair of theoretical physics; the first were created a few years later, and Fermi won the one in Rome.
Q 12In 1923 Fermi wrote that releasing the vast energy implied by E = mc² was what?
Not possible soon
Not possible soon, he wrote, and all to the good, since the blast would first blow to pieces the physicist unlucky enough to manage it; nineteen years later he built the first nuclear reactor himself.
Q 13After Göttingen, Fermi spent the autumn of 1924 studying under Paul Ehrenfest in which Dutch city?
Leiden
Q 21Whose discovery of artificial radioactivity in January 1934 prompted Fermi's neutron experiments?
The Joliot-Curies
The Joliot-Curies had used alpha particles, which a nucleus repels; Fermi reasoned that neutrons, having no charge, would get in far more easily, and within months his group had made dozens of elements radioactive.
Q 22The Rome neutron experiments mysteriously worked better on a table made of what?
Wood
Wood, unlike marble, slows the neutrons that pass through it, and slowed neutrons are captured far more readily; puzzling over the two tables led Fermi to try a block of paraffin wax, and the activity soared.
Q 23Passing neutrons through paraffin wax increased the radioactivity they induced by roughly how much?
A hundredfold
Leiden: after an unhappy spell at Göttingen, where he felt the professors ignored him, Fermi found in Ehrenfest a warm friend who encouraged him, and he got to know Samuel Goudsmit there.
Q 14Fermions, the particles named after Fermi, are defined by obeying which rule?
Exclusion principle
Exclusion principle: Wolfgang Pauli's rule that no two such particles can share a quantum state was applied to a gas by Fermi in 1926, and the resulting statistics made the 24-year-old's international name.
Q 15With Chicago Pile-1 close to going critical on the big day, what did Fermi calmly call for?
A lunch break
A lunch break: an automatic safety rod had just slammed back into the pile because its trip level was set too low, so he sent everyone off to eat; work resumed at two and the reaction came that afternoon.
Q 16The 'Via Panisperna boys' took their nickname from the Rome street that housed which building?
The physics institute
The physics institute of Rome's university stood on that street, and it was there in 1934 that the group found that slowed neutrons trigger far more reactions, the discovery that later made nuclear reactors possible.
Q 17Which political party did Fermi join in 1929, nine years before he left Italy for good?
The Fascist Party
The Fascist Party gained him as a member in 1929, the year Mussolini named him to the new Royal Academy of Italy with its handsome stipend; he was no believer, the membership a professional necessity for a non-political man.
Q 18Which name did Fermi bring into physics for the uncharged particle Pauli had proposed to explain beta decay?
Neutrino
Neutrino is an Italian diminutive, in effect 'little neutral one', which set it apart from the far heavier neutron; Fermi's theory showed why it would be so hard to catch, and it was not detected until after his death.
Q 19The journal Nature rejected Fermi's beta-decay paper as containing speculations that were what?
'Too remote from physical reality'
'Too remote from physical reality' was the editor's verdict on what became the theory of the weak force, one of nature's four fundamental interactions; Fermi published it in Italian and German instead.
Q 20Which physicist, later head of theory at Los Alamos, co-wrote a 1932 paper with Fermi in Rome?
Hans Bethe
Hans Bethe came on a travelling fellowship in 1931 and again in 1932, one of a stream of young foreigners, Felix Bloch and Rudolf Peierls among them, whose arrival showed how far physics in Rome had risen under Fermi.
A hundredfold: Fermi had the explanation within hours, and the methods his group built on the effect were the ones he later used to design the first nuclear reactor.
Q 24Fermi concluded that neutrons were slowed by collisions with atoms of which element?
Hydrogen
Hydrogen: its nucleus is a single proton with almost exactly a neutron's mass, so one collision can rob a neutron of most of its speed, where it would simply bounce off a heavy nucleus such as lead.
Q 25Fermi's group named two supposed new elements ausenium and what, the latter after a poetic Greek name for Italy?
Hesperium
Hesperium came from Hesperia, 'the land of the west', as the Greeks called Italy; the real elements 93 and 94 were identified a few years later and named neptunium and plutonium.
Q 26During Chicago Pile-1's first run, physicist Norman Hilberry stood by with which tool to drop an emergency control rod?
An axe
An axe: the rod hung from a rope, and he was to chop through it if the automatic controls failed, while other men stood ready to drench the pile in a cadmium solution as a last resort.
Q 27At which American port did Fermi's family land in January 1939?
New York
New York was where the family's liner docked on 2 January 1939; in complete secrecy, Fermi had lined up an American professorship before leaving Italy, so they came ashore as emigrants, not visitors.
Q 28Fermi left Italy in 1938 chiefly because new laws threatened his wife Laura, who was what?
Jewish
Jewish: Laura Capon came from a respected Roman family, and though Fermi was not Jewish and their two children were Catholics, the laws also put several of his assistants out of work; the family left within months.
Q 29Before his years at Chicago, which university did Fermi join on arriving in America in 1939?
Columbia
Columbia was one of five universities to offer him a post, and within weeks of his arrival a team there that included Fermi ran the first American experiment to split the uranium atom.
Q 30Who carried the news of uranium fission across the Atlantic in January 1939, two weeks after Fermi's arrival?
Niels Bohr
Niels Bohr landed from Copenhagen with the news; within days a team including Fermi had repeated the experiment at his new university, and he turned at once to the idea of a chain reaction.