Materials Science
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50 free Materials Science trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Everything people build is limited by what it is made of. Materials science is the study of why a metal bends where a ceramic shatters, why one plastic melts and another chars, and how changing a recipe by a fraction of a percent can turn a soft solid into a hard one. It sits where physics, chemistry and engineering meet, and its history is full of lucky accidents and stubborn experimenters. This quiz covers the ground a first course would: metals and their alloys, glass and ceramics, plastics and synthetic fibers, semiconductors and magnets, and the newer materials only a few atoms thick. It also asks about the properties engineers measure, the heat treatments and tests they rely on, the failures that taught hard lessons at sea, in the air and in space, and the scientists whose names ended up on laws, alloys and Nobel citations. It is written for students revising materials science and engineering, for teachers who want ready questions with answers, and for anyone curious about the stuff the modern world is made from. The early questions are ones most people can reason out; the later ones reward real study. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which one-atom-thick material did two Manchester physicists first isolate using sticky tape?
Graphene
Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms, and Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov first pulled it from graphite with adhesive tape in 2004.
Q 02Which fiber, five times stronger than steel by weight, did chemist Stephanie Kwolek invent?
Kevlar
Kevlar was first sold in the early 1970s to replace the steel in racing tires, long before it became the standard fiber of bulletproof vests.
Q 03Which material did chemist Roy Plunkett find by accident as white powder inside a gas cylinder?
Teflon
Teflon, or PTFE, formed when the gas Plunkett was storing for refrigerant research polymerized inside its cylinder, leaving one of the slipperiest solids known.
Q 04Which metal, then priced like silver, forms the small pyramid capping the Washington Monument?
Aluminum
Aluminum stopped being a precious novelty in 1886, two years after the cap was set, when the Hall–Héroult process made it cheap enough for mass production.
Q 05Which rubber seals did Richard Feynman dunk in ice water to explain the Challenger disaster?
O-rings
O-rings in the booster joints lost their springiness in the cold of launch morning, and Feynman proved it at a televised hearing with a clamp and a glass of ice water.
Q 06Which ultralight solid, nicknamed frozen smoke, did NASA's Stardust probe use to catch comet dust?
Aerogel
Aerogel is a gel whose liquid has been replaced with gas, leaving a solid that can be more than 99 percent air by volume.
Q 07Which source supplied the iron in Tutankhamun's dagger, made long before Egyptians smelted it?
A meteorite
A meteorite provided the metal, as the blade's high nickel content shows, and evidence of Egyptian iron smelting begins only some seven centuries after the burial.
Q 08Which metal, with the highest melting point of any, glows as the filament in old-style light bulbs?
Tungsten
Tungsten melts at 3,422 °C, which lets a filament run white-hot without turning liquid, and the same heat resistance puts it in rocket engine nozzles.
Q 09Which synthetic fiber, invented by Wallace Carothers, first went on sale as toothbrush bristles?
Nylon
Nylon reached shoppers in 1938 as toothbrush bristles, before the stockings that made it famous, which sold 64 million pairs in their first year.
Q 10Which element, second most abundant in Earth's crust, is purified into wafers for computer chips?
Silicon
Silicon makes up about 28 percent of the crust by mass, yet chipmakers must refine it to extreme purity before it can be sliced into wafers.
Q 11Which molten metal does glass float on in the Pilkington process for making flat window panes?
Tin
Tin stays liquid and calm at glassmaking temperatures and is denser than glass, so the hot ribbon spreads perfectly flat across its surface.
Q 12Which gemstone did General Electric learn to make in 1954 using extreme heat and crushing pressure?
Diamond
Diamond first grew with commercial success in Tracy Hall's belt press that December, and synthetic stones went on to supply nearly all the diamond used in industry.
Q 13Which device, first built at Bell Labs from a sliver of germanium, replaced the vacuum tube?
Transistor
The transistor grew out of 1947 experiments by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, who pressed two metal contacts onto the crystal and saw a signal come out stronger than it went in.
Q 21Which metal is the most malleable of all, a single gram of it hammering out to a full square meter?
Gold
Gold can be beaten into leaf thin enough to let light through, which is how gilders cover statues and domes with very little of it.
Q 22Which structural weakness broke up two de Havilland Comets, the first jet airliners, in mid-flight?
Metal fatigue
Metal fatigue was not fully understood at the time, and the cracks were traced to stress concentrations around square cut-outs in the fuselage.
Q 23Which American cargo vessels of World War II sometimes broke in half when cold made steel brittle?
Liberty ships
Liberty ships suffered hull cracks that Constance Tipper of Cambridge traced to the steel itself, which lost its toughness below a critical temperature.
Q 14Which volcanic rock did Stone Age toolmakers chip into blades sharper than a steel scalpel?
Obsidian
Obsidian fractures to a cutting edge only about three nanometers thick, which is why it has even been made into surgical scalpel blades.
Q 15Which light metal names the rechargeable batteries honored by the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry?
Lithium
Lithium is the least dense of all metals, and the batteries built on it made laptops, mobile phones and electric cars practical.
Q 16Which English scientist first published his law of stretching springs as a Latin anagram?
Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke announced the law in 1676 in scrambled form and waited two years before revealing the solution: the extension is proportional to the force.
Q 17Which mineral sits at the very bottom of the Mohs scale of hardness?
Talc
Talc, the mineral ground into baby powder, defines 1 on the scale Friedrich Mohs introduced in 1812, which ranks each mineral by which of the others it can scratch.
Q 18Which element, at least a tenth of the alloy, gives stainless steel its resistance to rust?
Chromium
Chromium reacts with oxygen to form an invisibly thin protective film on the surface, and the film heals itself whenever it is scratched.
Q 19Which element did Charles Goodyear cook with rubber on a hot stove to invent vulcanization?
Sulfur
Sulfur forms cross-links between rubber's long chain molecules, making it tough and durable; before that, rubber goods went soft and sticky in the heat.
Q 20Which metal is the main ingredient of both bronze and brass, two alloys worked since ancient times?
Copper
Copper makes up roughly two thirds of typical brass and nearly nine tenths of bronze, the alloy hard enough to give an age of prehistory its name.
Q 24Which English inventor patented the converter that makes steel by blowing air through molten iron?
Henry Bessemer
Henry Bessemer's blast of air, patented in 1856, burns the excess carbon out of pig iron, and it gave the world its first inexpensive way to mass-produce steel.
Q 25Which New York glassmaker launched Pyrex ovenware and later the Gorilla Glass on phone screens?
Corning
Corning supplied the cover glass for the first iPhone in 2007, a toughened sheet that grew out of its 1960s Chemcor project.
Q 26Which husband in a Nobel-winning couple names the temperature at which magnets lose their pull?
Pierre Curie
Pierre Curie tracked the change in 1895 with strong magnets and precision balances, showing that a magnet heated past a critical point loses its magnetism. For iron that point is about 770 °C.
Q 27Which plastic, the most widely produced of all, goes into milk jugs and carrier bags?
Polyethylene
Polyethylene was discovered by accident twice: by a German chemist in 1898, and again in 1933 at Britain's ICI, in the form industry could make.
Q 28Which state of matter, first seen in a compound with two melting points, now fills flat screens?
Liquid crystal
Liquid crystal behavior puzzled Friedrich Reinitzer in 1888, when his cholesterol compound melted into a cloudy fluid at 145.5 °C and then turned clear at 178.5 °C.
Q 29Which metal was Heike Kamerlingh Onnes chilling when its electrical resistance suddenly vanished?
Mercury
Mercury, frozen solid with liquid helium, lost all electrical resistance at about 4.2 kelvins in 1911, the first sighting of the effect now called superconductivity.
Q 30Which effect, first shown with crystals of quartz and cane sugar, now keeps time in wristwatches?
Piezoelectricity
Piezoelectricity turns pressure into voltage and back again, so a quartz sliver in a watch can be made to vibrate exactly 32,768 times a second.