History of Science
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50 free History of Science trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Science rarely moves in a straight line. Many of its greatest breakthroughs began with an accident, a hunch or an argument, and the people behind them were often ignored, mocked or put on trial before they were proved right. That mix of brilliance and human drama is what makes the story of discovery such good quiz material. This quiz covers that story from the ancient Greeks to modern particle physics. Expect questions on famous experiments and the instruments that made them possible, on the origins of vaccines and other medical advances, on the mapping of the heavens, the birth of chemistry and genetics, and the first steps in computing and spaceflight. It is written for curious players, students and quiz hosts alike. Every question comes with a short explanation, so even a wrong guess leaves you with a fact worth repeating.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Hollywood star of the 1940s co-invented a frequency-hopping radio system to guide Allied torpedoes?
Hedy Lamarr
Hedy Lamarr shared the patent with composer George Antheil. The same spread-spectrum principles are used today in Bluetooth and early versions of Wi-Fi.
Q 02Which element was detected in sunlight during an 1868 eclipse, decades before chemists isolated it on Earth?
Helium
Helium takes its name from helios, the Greek word for the Sun, where its yellow spectral line was first spotted. Chemists found it in a uranium ore in 1895.
Q 03Who coined the word radioactivity and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences?
Marie Curie
Marie Curie won the Physics prize in 1903 and the Chemistry prize in 1911. She was also the first woman to win a Nobel Prize at all.
Q 04Which theory of the universe's origin got its name from astronomer Fred Hoyle, who rejected it, on BBC radio?
Big Bang
The Big Bang was Hoyle's own phrase for an idea he argued against, preferring a steady-state universe. He later denied that he had meant the name as an insult.
Q 05Albert Einstein won his Nobel Prize in Physics for explaining which phenomenon, not for relativity?
Photoelectric effect
The photoelectric effect earned Einstein the 1921 prize at a time when some physicists still doubted relativity. The award was handed over a year late, in 1922.
Q 06Which Scottish bacteriologist discovered penicillin after a holiday left mould growing on his culture plates?
Alexander Fleming
Alexander Fleming came back to his laboratory in September 1928 and identified the stray mould as Penicillium. He shared the 1945 Nobel Prize with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain.
Q 07Which English physicist set out three laws of motion in the Principia and later ran the Royal Mint?
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton became Warden of the Mint in 1696 and Master in 1699, a post he held for the rest of his life. He reformed the coinage and pursued counterfeiters.
Q 08Which everyday word did William Whewell coin in 1833 for people then called natural philosophers?
Scientist
Scientist first appeared in print in Whewell's 1834 review of a book by Mary Somerville. He also coined 'physicist' and suggested 'anode' and 'cathode' to Michael Faraday.
Q 09Which explosive did Alfred Nobel patent in 1867, building the fortune that still funds his prizes?
Dynamite
Dynamite made nitroglycerin safe to carry by soaking it into diatomaceous earth. Nobel invented it in 1866, a year before patenting it in England and Sweden.
Q 10Which Italian astronomer spent his last years under house arrest after a trial by the Inquisition?
Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei had used his telescope to find four moons circling Jupiter, evidence that not everything orbits Earth. The Inquisition forced him to recant in 1633.
Q 11Which animal, born at Scotland's Roslin Institute, was the first mammal cloned from an adult cell?
Sheep
The sheep, called Dolly, was named after singer Dolly Parton because the donor cell came from a mammary gland. Her preserved body is on show at the National Museum of Scotland.
Q 12Gregor Mendel worked out the basic laws of inheritance by growing which crop in a monastery garden?
Peas
Peas gave Mendel seven clear traits to follow, such as seed shape and flower colour. His results were overlooked until other botanists rediscovered them around 1900.
Q 13Edward Jenner created the first vaccine in 1796 by giving a boy cowpox to protect him against which disease?
Smallpox
Smallpox was declared eradicated by the World Health Organization in 1980. The word vaccine comes from the Latin name Jenner gave cowpox, meaning pustules of the cow.
Q 21Which physicist predicted that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time?
Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at 21 and lived with it for more than 50 years. His book spent 237 weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list.
Q 22Which Bletchley Park codebreaker proposed the 'imitation game' as a test of whether machines can think?
Alan Turing
Alan Turing led Hut 8, the section that worked on German naval Enigma messages. His 1950 paper on thinking machines was written at the University of Manchester.
Q 23Which polished metal sphere, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, was Earth's first artificial satellite?
Sputnik 1
Q 14Which Royal Navy ship carried Charles Darwin around the world on a survey lasting almost five years?
HMS Beagle
HMS Beagle was commanded by Robert FitzRoy, and Darwin had been told the voyage would last only two years. He spent much of it ashore studying geology and natural history.
Q 15Jane Goodall overturned the belief that only humans make tools by watching which animals in Tanzania?
Chimpanzees
Chimpanzees at Gombe stripped the leaves from twigs to make them into better tools, Goodall saw from 1960. She also found that they eat meat, when they had been thought vegetarian.
Q 16Which Austrian physicist imagined a cat in a sealed box, both alive and dead, to challenge quantum theory?
Erwin Schrödinger
Erwin Schrödinger devised the thought experiment in 1935 while trading ideas with Albert Einstein. He meant it as a criticism of how Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg read quantum mechanics.
Q 17Which distant world did Clyde Tombaugh discover in 1930 on photographic plates at Lowell Observatory?
Pluto
Pluto got its name from Venetia Burney, an eleven-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford who loved classical mythology. It was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006.
Q 18Which Greek mathematician of Syracuse is said to have run from his bath crying 'Eureka' over a crown puzzle?
Archimedes
Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier when Syracuse fell, despite orders that he should not be harmed. The bath story was told by the Roman writer Vitruvius.
Q 19Which Russian physiologist won a Nobel Prize for work on digestion before his dogs made him famous?
Ivan Pavlov
Ivan Pavlov won the 1904 Nobel Prize in medicine, becoming the first Russian laureate. The conditioning experiments grew out of that research on the digestive glands of dogs.
Q 20Which secret wartime programme, with a laboratory at Los Alamos, produced the first nuclear weapons?
Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project took its name from the New York borough where its first headquarters stood. Its first device was detonated in the Trinity test in New Mexico in July 1945.
Sputnik 1 broadcast radio pulses for three weeks until its batteries ran down. Its launch set off the Sputnik crisis in America and started the Space Race.
Q 24Which particle was found at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in 2012 after a 40-year search by physicists?
Higgs boson
The Higgs boson earned Peter Higgs and François Englert the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for predicting it decades earlier. The media nicknamed it the God particle after a 1993 book.
Q 25Which hormone did Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolate in Toronto, transforming diabetes treatment?
Insulin
Insulin was first isolated from dog pancreas in John Macleod's laboratory at the University of Toronto. Banting later shared half of his Nobel Prize money with Best.
Q 26Which Russian chemist left gaps in his periodic table and predicted three elements yet to be discovered?
Dmitri Mendeleev
Dmitri Mendeleev called the missing elements eka-aluminium, eka-boron and eka-silicon. They were later discovered as gallium, scandium and germanium.
Q 27Which chemist first used a rabies vaccine on a boy mauled by a dog and also disproved spontaneous generation?
Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur gave nine-year-old Joseph Meister 13 inoculations over 11 days in July 1885. Three months later the boy was still in good health.
Q 28Jonas Salk chose not to patent or profit from the vaccine he announced in 1955 against which feared disease?
Polio
Polio had frightened so many families that Salk was hailed as a miracle worker when the vaccine's success was announced in April 1955. An oral vaccine by Albert Sabin came into use in 1961.
Q 29Which inventor backed direct current against George Westinghouse in the 1880s 'war of the currents'?
Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison's company claimed that high-voltage alternating current was hazardous, and it helped make sure the first electric chair was powered by a Westinghouse generator.
Q 30Which chemist led the London team behind Photo 51, the image that pointed to DNA's double helix?
Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958, aged 37, four years before Crick, Watson and Wilkins shared a Nobel Prize for the discovery. Her student Raymond Gosling took Photo 51 under her supervision in 1952.