Heat Trivia
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100 free Heat trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This heat trivia quiz covers the physics of heat and temperature the way a classroom does, with the stories attached. It starts with the basics: the three ways heat moves, the joule and the calorie, the specific heat of water, and what latent heat means. Then it walks the temperature scales and the people behind them: Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit's brine and mercury, Anders Celsius's upside-down scale and the botanist who flipped it, William Thomson becoming Lord Kelvin, and the hunt for absolute zero from Amontons to the 2019 SI redefinition. It closes with heat in the world: Death Valley's record, lightning at 30,000 °C, the Sun's 15-million-kelvin core, Finnish saunas, water boiling at 71 °C on Everest, and the melted candy bar that gave us the microwave oven. The easy questions ask which unit measures heat, what absolute zero is in Celsius, and which metal filled early thermometers. The harder ones ask who coined 'latent heat' for whisky distillers, which count bored cannon in Munich to refute caloric theory, which year the 'degree Kelvin' lost its degree, and what the first microwave oven was called. Our thermodynamics quiz and physics quiz are the neighbouring pages. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry for the concept, scale or scientist before publishing, and the sentence that supports it is stored with each question.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the SI unit of measurement for heat?
Joule
Joule is named after James Joule, who let a falling weight spin a paddle wheel in a barrel of water and showed that the stirring alone warmed it: work turns into heat.
Q 02Which American statesman invented a metal-lined fireplace in 1742 to give more heat with less smoke?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin never patented his stove, or any other invention: having gained so much from other people's ideas, he said, we should be glad to share our own freely.
Q 03Which glass cookware brand was launched in 1915 after a physicist's wife tried baking in a sawn-off battery jar?
Pyrex
Pyrex grew out of glass made for railway lanterns: physicist Jesse Littleton took home a sawn-off battery jar of it, and his wife Bessie baked in it without the glass cracking.
Q 04The word 'calorie' comes from 'calor', meaning 'heat' in which ancient language?
Latin
Latin calor gave the French chemist Nicolas Clément a name for the unit of heat he defined for his students in lectures of the early 1820s, while studying the fuel efficiency of steam engines.
Q 05Which property of water makes the sea warm more slowly than land?
Specific heat capacity
Specific heat capacity is unusually high for water, so oceans soak up summer heat and give it back slowly, which is why coastal cities see smaller swings of temperature than inland ones.
Q 06Which heat-transfer mechanism works by warmer, less dense fluid rising and cooler fluid sinking?
Convection
Convection also builds thunderstorms: air warmed by sunlit ground rises and cools until its water vapour condenses into towering storm clouds.
Q 07Which heat-transfer mechanism passes heat through a material, or between objects that are touching?
Conduction
Conduction is why a metal spoon feels colder than a wooden one at the same temperature: the metal carries heat away from your skin far faster.
Q 08Which word, also used for filament light bulbs, describes the glow an object gives off because it is hot?
Incandescence
Incandescence wastes most of a filament bulb's power as heat rather than light, which is why LED lamps, using up to 90% less energy, have replaced them.
Q 09Which gemstone carries heat away faster than any metal, a trait jewellers use to tell it from fakes?
Diamond
Diamond pulls heat away so quickly that the warm tip of a jeweller's probe cools the instant it touches a real stone, while most imitations barely take any heat at all.
Q 10Which Scottish chemist introduced the term 'latent heat' for the heat that melting ice absorbs without getting warmer?
Joseph Black
Joseph Black called the heat 'latent', meaning hidden: ice in a warm room went on soaking up heat for hours while a thermometer in it stayed at freezing.
Q 11What is absolute zero on the Celsius scale?
−273.15 °C
−273.15 °C was first glimpsed in chilled gases: they shrink so steadily as they cool that scientists could work out the temperature at which a gas would, in theory, shrink to nothing.
Q 12Which US national park has the world's largest concentration of geysers, heated by magma lying beneath it?
Yellowstone
Yellowstone has more than 10,000 hydrothermal features, over 500 of them geysers: rain seeps deep into the rock, is superheated by magma and rises back to the surface.
Q 13Which scales set their zero points at absolute zero by definition?
Kelvin and Rankine
Q 21Which NASA spacecraft flies through the Sun's atmosphere?
Parker Solar Probe
Parker Solar Probe flies behind a carbon shield whose Sun-facing side reaches about 1,400 °C, while the spacecraft in its shadow sits at about 30 °C, a warm summer's day.
Q 22Fahrenheit fixed 96 degrees on his original scale as the temperature of what?
A healthy human
A healthy human was Fahrenheit's upper marker: he first called body temperature 90 degrees and then 96; later fine-tuning of his scale is why normal body temperature now reads 98.6 instead.
Q 23In 1714 Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit built a reliable thermometer using which liquid?
Mercury
Kelvin and Rankine both count up from absolute zero: the Scottish engineer William Rankine set up his scale in 1859 with Fahrenheit-sized degrees, for those who did their sums in Fahrenheit.
Q 14Greece's Thermopylae means 'hot gates', after which natural feature there?
Sulphur springs
Sulphur springs still run hot at Thermopylae, the narrow coastal pass where about 7,000 Greeks under the Spartan king Leonidas held back a far larger Persian army in 480 BC.
Q 15In 1954 the kelvin was defined by fixing 273.16 K as the temperature of what?
Triple point of water
Triple point of water is the one temperature and pressure at which ice, liquid water and vapour all exist together, so any lab can recreate it exactly inside a sealed glass cell.
Q 16The hot 'dog days' of summer are named after which star?
Sirius
Sirius, the Dog Star, returned to the dawn sky in the hottest weeks of the year, and the ancient Greeks and Romans believed the brilliant star was adding its own heat to the Sun's.
Q 17Anders Celsius's original 1742 scale set which value at the boiling point of water?
0
0 marked boiling and 100 marked freezing on Celsius's scale, so a hotter day gave a lower reading; the two points were swapped into their modern order after his death in 1744.
Q 18Which German chemist gave his name to the adjustable gas burner used in school science labs?
Robert Bunsen
Robert Bunsen introduced the burner in 1855: mixing air into the gas before it burns gives a much hotter flame, the idea later built into the gas-stove burner.
Q 19What was the profession of Anders Celsius, after whom the scale is named?
Astronomer
Astronomer Anders Celsius built Uppsala's observatory and joined a 1736 expedition to Lapland whose measurements confirmed that the Earth is slightly flattened at the poles.
Q 20Fahrenheit set 0 °F with a freezing mix of ice, water and sal ammoniac, the old name for which salt?
Ammonium chloride
Ammonium chloride, ice and water settle by themselves at one steady low temperature, which gave Fahrenheit a zero that any instrument maker could reproduce at the bench.
Mercury made Fahrenheit's thermometers the standard for almost three centuries, but it is a potent neurotoxin, and in 2011 America's standards lab stopped calibrating mercury thermometers altogether.
Q 24Which Italian scientist is generally credited with the first thermometer, an upturned glass flask?
Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei is said to have built it, though others have a claim too: air trapped in the flask swelled and shrank with the temperature and moved the water in its neck, but with no scale it showed changes, not degrees.
Q 25A bimetallic strip bends as it warms because its two metals differ in which property?
Thermal expansion
Thermal expansion differs between the two bonded metals, so one side lengthens more and the strip curls; that curl once switched home thermostats on and off.
Q 26Which actor played detective Virgil Tibbs in the 1967 crime drama In the Heat of the Night?
Sidney Poitier
Sidney Poitier's Virgil Tibbs is picked up as a murder suspect in a Mississippi town, turns out to be a top homicide detective from Philadelphia, and stays to help solve the case.
Q 27Who observed heat from boring cannon in Munich and reported on it in 1798?
Count Rumford
Count Rumford, born Benjamin Thompson in Massachusetts, bored a cannon barrel under water with a blunt drill and brought the water to the boil by friction alone, heat that never seemed to run out.
Q 28Which chemist introduced a version of the caloric theory, treating heat as a fluid?
Antoine Lavoisier
Antoine Lavoisier listed caloric, a weightless substance of heat, among his 33 chemical elements, as though warmth were a material like any metal or gas.
Q 29Which Munich park was created from 1789 at the urging of the physicist Benjamin Thompson, an adviser to Bavaria's ruler?
Englischer Garten
Englischer Garten was decreed in 1789 to be 'not just for one section of society but for the whole population', and it is still one of the largest inner-city parks in the world.
Q 30Who invented the vacuum flask, or thermos, in 1892?
James Dewar
James Dewar built the flask to keep liquefied gases cold in his laboratory; it reached picnic baskets only after a German firm began selling it under the name Thermos in 1904.