Famous Scientists Trivia
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98 free Famous Scientists trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Science is a story of people: a friar counting pea plants, a bookbinder's apprentice who changed electricity, a physicist hunting counterfeiters for the Royal Mint. Every question here is about a person, what they found and the odd turn their life took. The fifty questions cover discoveries, Nobel Prizes, famous experiments, rivalries and quotes, from the household names to the people whose work was credited to someone else. Every answer comes with an explanation that adds the detail worth remembering. It suits a pub quiz round, a classroom starter or anyone who likes knowing who really found what.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which scientist alone has won Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, physics and chemistry?
Marie Curie
Marie Curie left notebooks so radioactive that they are kept in lead-lined boxes, and anyone consulting them must wear protective clothing.
Q 02Which physicist's Nobel Prize cited the photoelectric effect?
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein had already promised the prize money to his ex-wife Mileva Marić in their divorce settlement, two years before he won it.
Q 03Which scientist spent his last three decades running the Royal Mint and prosecuting counterfeiters?
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton gathered evidence disguised as a bar-room regular and successfully prosecuted 28 coiners, including William Chaloner, who was hanged.
Q 04Which naturalist rushed to publish once Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay with the same idea?
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin missed the joint reading on 1 July 1858, grieving his baby son, who had died of scarlet fever just days before.
Q 05Which astronomer did the Inquisition find 'vehemently suspect of heresy' and keep under house arrest?
Galileo Galilei
It took until 1992 for Pope John Paul II to acknowledge 'the error of the theologians of the time' who opposed Galileo Galilei.
Q 06Which inventor's alternating current fought Thomas Edison's direct current in the 'war of currents'?
Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla had once worked for Edison himself, before George Westinghouse acquired his alternating-current patents.
Q 07Which chemist tested his rabies vaccine in 1885 on a nine-year-old boy mauled by a rabid dog?
Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur was not a licensed physician, so treating Joseph Meister was technically practising without a licence, yet the boy never developed rabies.
Q 08Which bacteriologist found mould killing bacteria on a culture plate left out during a 1928 holiday?
Alexander Fleming
Alexander Fleming's penicillin became a medicine only after Howard Florey and Ernst Chain's Oxford team showed in 1940 that it could treat infections.
Q 09Which physicist, diagnosed with motor neurone disease at 21, went on to write A Brief History of Time?
Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking lived for more than 50 years after that diagnosis, dying in 2018 at the age of 76.
Q 10Which daughter of Lord Byron wrote an algorithm for Charles Babbage's unbuilt Analytical Engine?
Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace was taught mathematics from an early age because her mother wanted to keep her from taking after Lord Byron.
Q 11Whose DNA image, known as Photo 51, was shown to James Watson?
Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Franklin died of ovarian cancer at 37 in 1958, four years before Watson, Crick and Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize.
Q 12Which friar found the laws of inheritance by growing some 28,000 plants, mostly peas, at his abbey?
Gregor Mendel
Gregor Mendel's paper went largely unappreciated until scientists rediscovered his laws in 1900.
Q 13Which chemist left gaps in his 1869 periodic table for elements that had not yet been discovered?
Dmitri Mendeleev
Dmitri Mendeleev's predicted 'eka-aluminium' turned up as gallium in 1875, with almost exactly the properties he had forecast.
Q 21Which astronomer, whose mother stood trial for witchcraft, showed planets orbit in ellipses, not circles?
Johannes Kepler
Johannes Kepler found the ellipse by wrestling for years with the orbit of Mars, publishing the result in Astronomia nova in 1609.
Q 22Which bookbinder's apprentice became Humphry Davy's lab assistant and discovered electromagnetic induction?
Michael Faraday
Michael Faraday turned down a knighthood and twice refused to be President of the Royal Society.
Q 23Which Scottish physicist unified electricity and magnetism and demonstrated the first durable colour photograph?
James Clerk Maxwell
Q 14Which Bletchley codebreaker, prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts, received a royal pardon in 2013?
Alan Turing
Alan Turing's pardon led to the 2017 'Alan Turing law', which pardoned men convicted under the same old laws against homosexual acts.
Q 15Which physicist dunked a clamped sample of O-ring material in ice water at a televised Challenger hearing?
Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman, a bongo player who cracked safes at Los Alamos, shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for quantum electrodynamics.
Q 16Which physicist's 1935 thought experiment left a boxed cat both alive and dead to mock quantum orthodoxy?
Erwin Schrödinger
Erwin Schrödinger had left Germany in 1933, refusing to live where persecution of Jews had become national policy.
Q 17Which virologist replied 'Could you patent the sun?' when asked who owned the patent on his polio vaccine?
Jonas Salk
Jonas Salk vaccinated his own children before the 1954 national field trial.
Q 18Which doctor gave his gardener's eight-year-old son cowpox in 1796, then exposed the boy to smallpox?
Edward Jenner
Edward Jenner had been elected to the Royal Society not for medicine but for showing that a cuckoo chick pushes its foster siblings out of the nest.
Q 19Which Greek ran naked through Syracuse crying 'Eureka' after his bath showed how to test a gold crown?
Archimedes
Archimedes's bath story was first written down by Vitruvius some two centuries later, and some scholars doubt it happened.
Q 20Which astronomer's Sun-centred model appeared in De revolutionibus just before his death in 1543?
Nicolaus Copernicus
Nicolaus Copernicus's book opened with an unsigned preface, added without his authorisation by Andreas Osiander, calling the Sun-centred model a mere aid to calculation.
James Clerk Maxwell had a tartan ribbon photographed three times through red, green and blue filters for an 1861 Royal Institution lecture.
Q 24Which naturalist formalised the two-word Latin naming system that labels humans Homo sapiens?
Carl Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus's own remains were chosen by botanist William Stearn in 1959 as the type specimen of Homo sapiens, so the man who named the species is its reference individual.
Q 25Which German meteorologist proposed continental drift in 1912 and died on the Greenland ice in 1930?
Alfred Wegener
Alfred Wegener was buried where he fell, with his skis stuck upright in the snow; geologists dismissed him as an outsider until plate tectonics emerged.
Q 26Which geneticist found genes that jump position in maize, decades before her 1983 Nobel Prize in Medicine?
Barbara McClintock
Barbara McClintock, after meeting some scepticism about her research, stopped publishing her data in journals.
Q 27Which physicist explained nuclear fission with her nephew but was left out of Otto Hahn's Nobel Prize?
Lise Meitner
Lise Meitner refused to work on the Manhattan Project, declaring, 'I will have nothing to do with a bomb!'
Q 28Which primatologist first saw Gombe chimpanzees strip leaves from twigs to fish for termites in 1960?
Jane Goodall
Jane Goodall had no university degree, yet Cambridge let her study for a PhD on the strength of her Gombe work.
Q 29Which marine biologist's book Silent Spring turned the pesticide DDT into a national scandal in 1962?
Rachel Carson
Rachel Carson was already being treated for breast cancer when Silent Spring came out, and she died in 1964, eight years before the United States banned DDT.
Q 30Which astronomer proposed the 'Pale Blue Dot' photograph of Earth that Voyager 1 took in 1990?
Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan also designed the gold-anodized Pioneer plaques with Frank Drake, a pictorial message for any alien who finds Pioneer 10 or 11.