60 free Hard Science trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
52 free hard science trivia questions with answers. Most science quizzes stop at the chemical symbol for gold. This one starts there and keeps going. Fifty hard science trivia questions cover the element found on the Sun before Earth, the densest metal, the martyrs of fluorine, the constants that now define the kilogram and the metre, the particle predicted 40 years before it was found, the planet located by mathematics, the woman who worked out what stars are made of, the physics of fission, prions, transposons, CRISPR, ribosomes and a mathematician who left 3,900 results behind. Every question is genuinely difficult but unambiguous. Nothing here needs a calculator, but most of it needs a science degree, a habit of reading Nobel citations, or a very good memory. If you want to humble a pub quiz team, a physics class or a group chat of engineers, this is the round. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia article on the element, particle, person or discovery in question, and each question shows its source under the explanation.
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Q 01Which element was seen in the Sun's spectrum in 1868, decades before being found on Earth?
Helium
The bright yellow line at 587.49 nm was first taken for sodium; Norman Lockyer named the element for the Greek sun god.
Q 02In 2007, dehydrated tardigrades survived ten days exposed to what on the FOTON-M3 mission?
The vacuum of space
Some even survived the full range of solar ultraviolet, and back on Earth they rehydrated, moved and laid viable eggs.
Q 03Which two different sciences did the same woman win Nobel Prizes in, a feat no one else has matched?
Physics and Chemistry
She shared the 1903 physics prize with Pierre and Becquerel, and took the 1911 chemistry prize alone; the family went on to collect five Nobels.
Q 04Which pioneering scientist named the first element she discovered after her homeland, Poland?
Marie Curie
Polonium honoured Poland; radium followed. Perey, a Curie student, later named francium for France.
Q 05Which is the densest stable element, about twice as dense as lead?
Osmium
It edges out iridium so narrowly (22.587 vs 22.562 g/cm3) that only 1990s X-ray crystallography settled the contest.
Q 06Which metal has the highest melting point of any element, at 3,422 °C?
Tungsten
Carbon holds solid to higher temperatures but sublimes rather than melts at atmospheric pressure, so it has no melting point to compete.
Q 07Which element, discovered by Marguerite Perey in 1939, was the last found in nature?
Francium
Its most stable isotope has a half-life of only 22 minutes; it had been predicted as 'eka-caesium'.
Q 08Which element became, in 1937, the first to be produced predominantly artificially, hence its name?
Technetium
Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segrè found it in cyclotron parts from Berkeley; Mendeleev had predicted it as ekamanganese.
Q 09Gallium's melting point of about 29.8 °C means it will do what?
Melt in a person's hand
It is one of only four metals liquid at or near room temperature and, unlike mercury, is non-toxic enough for high-temperature thermometers.
Q 10Bismuth-209, long thought stable, was found in 2003 to decay with a half-life of how long?
A billion times the age of the universe
Researchers at Orsay detected the alpha decay; the activity works out to about 3 becquerels per tonne.
Q 11Several 19th-century chemists were maimed or killed trying to isolate which reactive element?
Fluorine
Henri Moissan finally isolated it in 1886 and got the 1906 chemistry Nobel two months before his death.
Q 12Since the 2019 SI redefinition, the kilogram is defined by fixing the exact value of what?
The Planck constant
It replaced the platinum-iridium cylinder kept near Paris; the new definition took effect on 20 May 2019.
Q 13Since 1983, the metre has been defined in terms of what?
The speed of light
Light's speed in vacuum is fixed at exactly 299,792,458 m/s, so the metre is the distance light covers in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
Q 21Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson accidentally discovered what in 1964 with a horn antenna in New Jersey?
The cosmic microwave background
The relic radiation now corresponds to a black body at about 2.7 K; they initially blamed the noise on pigeon droppings.
Q 22Which planet was the only one located by mathematical prediction before it was seen through a telescope?
Neptune
Johann Galle found it on 23 September 1846 within a degree of Le Verrier's predicted position, based on wobbles in Uranus's orbit.
Q 23Which planet rotates clockwise on its axis, opposite to its direction of orbit around the Sun?
Venus
Q 14Superconductivity was discovered in 1911 by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes while cooling which element?
Mercury
Its resistance vanished at 4.2 K, using the liquid helium he had recently been first to produce.
Q 15The complete expulsion of a magnetic field from a superconductor's interior is called what?
The Meissner effect
Meissner and Ochsenfeld found it in 1933; it is why a magnet levitates over a cooled superconductor.
Q 16Absolute zero corresponds to what temperature on the Celsius scale?
−273.15 °C
The third law of thermodynamics implies no physical process can reach it in a finite number of steps.
Q 17Who proposed the neutrino in 1930 to save a bedrock principle that beta decay seemed to violate?
Wolfgang Pauli
Fermi supplied the name 'little neutral one'; the particle was not detected until Cowan and Reines in 1956, work rewarded with a Nobel in 1995.
Q 18Who first detected the positron, the electron's antiparticle, in 1932?
Carl Anderson
Dirac's equation had predicted it; Anderson found it in cosmic-ray tracks and named it from 'positive electron'.
Q 19The particle consistent with the Higgs boson was announced in 2012 by which two experiments?
ATLAS and CMS
The 40-year search ended at CERN's Large Hadron Collider; Peter Higgs and François Englert shared the 2013 Nobel.
Q 20Which Nobel laureate's 1993 book gave the Higgs boson its unloved nickname, the 'God particle'?
Leon Lederman
Peter Higgs himself objected to the name.
Its slow retrograde spin is thought to result from solar tides fighting the differential heating of its crushing atmosphere; it also has no moons.
Q 24Who proposed in 1950 the distant cloud of icy bodies now thought to be the source of long-period comets?
Jan Oort
It is theorised to extend from 2,000 to 200,000 AU, up to 3.2 light-years from the Sun; Öpik had floated a similar idea earlier.
Q 25On 25 August 2012, Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to do what?
Enter interstellar space
Launched in 1977, it crossed the heliopause 35 years later and is the most distant human-made object.
Q 26Who discovered Pluto in 1930 at Lowell Observatory?
Clyde Tombaugh
He was 23 and newly hired; Pluto's largest moon Charon is over half its diameter, so the pair are sometimes called a binary.
Q 27Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin's 1925 thesis correctly concluded that stars are made mostly of what?
Hydrogen and helium
Henry Norris Russell rejected the finding at first because it contradicted the belief that Sun and Earth had similar compositions.
Q 28Which physicist worked out fission with her nephew Otto Frisch in 1938 but was left out of Otto Hahn's Nobel?
Lise Meitner
Element 109, meitnerium, is named for her; she was the first woman to be a full professor of physics in Germany.
Q 29Chicago Pile-1, the first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, went critical on what date?
2 December 1942
The team built it under the stands of a University of Chicago football field.
Q 30Which physicist received the 1945 Nobel Prize for the exclusion principle, after nomination by Einstein?
Wolfgang Pauli
Colleagues joked about the 'Pauli effect', his supposed knack for breaking lab equipment simply by being nearby.