Famous Physicists Trivia
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60 free Famous Physicists trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This famous physicists trivia quiz is about the people rather than the equations. It runs from Archimedes and his bath through Galileo's Starry Messenger and house arrest, Newton's Principia and his years chasing counterfeiters at the Mint, to the giants of the 19th century — Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin, Boltzmann, Hertz and Röntgen, the first Nobel laureate. Then it moves into the quantum and nuclear age: Planck, Einstein, Bohr, de Broglie, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, Bose, Raman, Meitner, Fermi, Oppenheimer, Chadwick, Wu, Yukawa, Landau, Sakharov, Feynman, Gell-Mann, Bethe, Chandrasekhar, Hawking, Higgs and Kip Thorne. Expect questions on who discovered what, who won which prize for what, and the human details — the O-ring in the ice water, the bongos, the ashes in Westminster Abbey. About a third are easy; the rest reward people who read biographies. Our physics and Hubble Space Telescope pages go deeper on the science. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia's biographies and the sources they cite, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 1687 book by Isaac Newton set out the laws of motion and universal gravitation?
Principia Mathematica
Principia Mathematica reached print only because Edmond Halley paid for it himself. The Royal Society had approved the book but had no money left to publish it.
Q 02With which German mathematician does Newton share credit for inventing calculus?
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz reached calculus independently. Newton's supporters accused him of plagiarism, yet the notation used today, dx and the integral sign, is his.
Q 03What government post did Isaac Newton hold from 1699 until his death in 1727?
Master of the Mint
Master of the Mint could have been a comfortable reward for past work, but Newton treated it as a real job, overseeing the coinage and pursuing counterfeiters.
Q 04Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize was awarded specifically for which discovery?
The photoelectric effect
The photoelectric effect was the only discovery the citation named. The committee found no 1921 nominee worthy, so the prize was held over and he received it a year late, in 1922.
Q 05Where was Einstein working when he published his four groundbreaking papers of 1905?
The Swiss Patent Office in Bern
The Swiss Patent Office in Bern took him on as a technical assistant because he could not find a teaching post. He wrote the four papers there in his spare time.
Q 06Galileo announced his first telescope discoveries in 1610 in which short book?
The Starry Messenger
The Starry Messenger reported four moons circling Jupiter. Galileo named them after the Medici family, and the flattered grand duke of Tuscany made him his court mathematician and philosopher.
Q 07After his trial, Galileo spent his final years under house arrest at his villa where?
Arcetri, near Florence
Arcetri, near Florence, put Galileo close to his daughter, a nun in a nearby convent. Going blind there, he completed a last book on motion that was spirited out of Italy and printed in Leiden.
Q 08Marie Curie is the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in which two different sciences?
Physics and Chemistry
Physics and Chemistry. The 1903 physics nomination at first left her out; her husband Pierre protested, her name was added, and in 1911 she won the chemistry prize on her own.
Q 09Which element did Marie Curie name after her homeland?
Polonium
Polonium honoured a country missing from the map: when she named it in 1898, Poland had been divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria for about a century.
Q 10Which element, discovered at Niels Bohr's institute in Copenhagen, is named after the city's Latin name?
Hafnium
Hafnium comes from Hafnia, the Latin for Copenhagen. A French chemist had claimed the missing element in 1911 but described it wrongly; the Copenhagen pair isolated the real thing in 1923.
Q 11Which principle of Niels Bohr's holds that quantum objects behave as waves or as particles, but never both at once?
Complementarity
Complementarity mattered so much to Bohr that, on receiving Denmark's Order of the Elephant in 1947, he put a yin-yang symbol on his coat of arms with a motto meaning 'opposites are complementary'.
Q 12Richard Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for work on which theory?
Quantum electrodynamics
Quantum electrodynamics describes how charged particles and radiation interact. Feynman tamed its calculations by drawing each interaction as a simple diagram, a shorthand physicists still use.
Q 13Richard Feynman sat on the presidential commission that investigated what?
Q 21Paul Dirac's 1928 equation predicted the existence of what?
Antimatter
Antimatter came out of extra solutions to Dirac's equation, which he read as a new kind of particle with the opposite charge. In 1932 Carl Anderson caught the first one crossing a cloud chamber.
Q 22Enrico Fermi's team built which world first beneath the stands of a Chicago football stadium in 1942?
A nuclear reactor
A nuclear reactor, stacked from graphite blocks and uranium in a squash court. The project's head never asked the university president for permission, reasoning that he could only have said no.
Q 23J. Robert Oppenheimer directed which wartime laboratory, earning the label 'father of the atomic bomb'?
Los Alamos
The Challenger disaster
The Challenger disaster. At a televised hearing Feynman dunked a piece of the booster's rubber seal in ice water, showing how it stiffened in the cold of launch morning.
Q 14Max Planck won the 1918 Nobel Prize for the discovery of what?
Energy quanta
Energy quanta were, in Planck's own words, 'an act of despair' to make his radiation formula work. A reluctant revolutionary, he then spent years trying to fit them back into the old physics.
Q 15Maxwell's equations unified electricity, magnetism and what?
Light
Light. Around 1862 Maxwell calculated how fast an electric and magnetic disturbance should travel, found it matched the measured speed of light, and refused to call that a coincidence.
Q 16The farad, named after Michael Faraday, is the SI unit of which quantity?
Capacitance
Capacitance is measured in farads. Faraday himself had little schooling: apprenticed to a bookbinder at 14, he educated himself by reading the books that passed through the shop.
Q 17Which Cambridge chair, once held by Newton and Dirac, did Stephen Hawking occupy from 1979 to 2009?
Lucasian Professor of Mathematics
Lucasian Professor of Mathematics was Isaac Newton's old chair. Hawking held it for thirty years and stepped down in 2009 only because its holder must retire at 67.
Q 18Which 1988 book by Stephen Hawking stayed on the Sunday Times bestseller list for 237 weeks?
A Brief History of Time
A Brief History of Time made a worldwide celebrity of a man who, in his early twenties, had been told he had about two years to live; he was 46 when it came out.
Q 19Which Austrian physicist coined the term 'entanglement' in 1935 and has quantum theory's central equation named after him?
Erwin Schrödinger
Erwin Schrödinger meant his famous cat, alive and dead at once in a sealed box, as a 'quite ridiculous' case: he was arguing that the prevailing reading of quantum theory led to absurdity.
Q 20Werner Heisenberg is famous for the uncertainty principle, but his 1932 Nobel cited 'the creation of' what?
Quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics began to take shape in 1925 on Heligoland, a tiny North Sea island where the 23-year-old Heisenberg had fled to escape a severe bout of hay fever.
Los Alamos stood in the New Mexico high country Oppenheimer had loved since horseback trips in his youth; he and General Groves picked the site of a remote boys' school there for the secret lab.
Q 24At which German university did J. Robert Oppenheimer earn his doctorate in 1927, studying under Max Born?
Göttingen
Göttingen. Max Born invited him there from Cambridge, where Oppenheimer had realised his talent lay in theory rather than laboratory work; he left Germany with his doctorate in 1927.
Q 25Ernest Rutherford's 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry honoured his work on what?
Radioactive decay
Radioactive decay. Atoms were thought to be stable and unchanging until Rutherford showed that radioactive ones break down into other elements, which the citation called 'the disintegration of the elements'.
Q 26Which two assistants performed Rutherford's gold foil experiment?
Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden
Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, the latter still an undergraduate, saw a few alpha particles bounce straight back. Rutherford said it was like firing a 15-inch shell at tissue paper and having it hit you.
Q 27Nikola Tesla is best known for his contributions to which system of electricity supply?
Alternating current
Alternating current proved itself in 1893, when Westinghouse, which held the rights to Tesla's patents, used his system to illuminate the Chicago World's Fair and then won the contract to harness Niagara Falls.
Q 28Which Austrian-Swedish physicist helped explain nuclear fission yet never won a Nobel Prize?
Lise Meitner
Lise Meitner fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and, within months, worked out with her nephew Otto Frisch how the uranium nucleus had split. The Nobel Prize for the discovery went to Otto Hahn alone.
Q 29Emmy Noether's famous theorem connects conservation laws to what?
Symmetries
Symmetries. When Noether proved it, her university would not let a woman lecture, so for years her courses were advertised under the name of the mathematician David Hilbert.
Q 30Chien-Shiung Wu's famous experiment overturned the conservation of which quantity?
Parity
Parity, the rule that nature treats a process and its mirror image alike, fell to her experiment. The theorists who proposed the test, Lee and Yang, won the 1957 Nobel Prize; she was left out.