Richard Feynman Trivia
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69 free Richard Feynman trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Richard Feynman trivia quiz covers the physicist, the prankster and the teacher. The easy questions handle what most people know: the 1965 Nobel Prize, the diagrams, the atomic bomb, the bongos, the Challenger O-ring demonstration. From there it digs into the anecdotes that made him famous: the Los Alamos safe-cracking, the IQ score he liked to quote, the plate wobbling in the Cornell cafeteria, the sabbatical in Brazil, the licence plate on the van and the divorce complaint about calculus. The harder end is for people who have read Gleick's Genius or the memoirs: the physicist who recruited him to the bomb project, the friend whose car he borrowed, the 1948 conference where nobody understood him, the man who translated his diagrams for the rest of physics, the rival who called partons 'put-ons', the student credited with 'swallowing the doctor', and the trip he never got to make. Every answer was checked against Feynman's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our physics and Manhattan Project quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 69 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and which Japanese physicist?
Shin'ichiro Tomonaga
All three had independently tamed the infinities in quantum electrodynamics; Freeman Dyson later showed their methods were equivalent.
Q 02Feynman's Nobel Prize recognised his fundamental work in which theory?
Quantum electrodynamics
Quantum electrodynamics is the theory of how light and matter interact; his rebuilt version got rid of the meaningless infinite answers the older one kept producing.
Q 03Feynman grew up in Far Rockaway, which lies in which New York City borough?
Queens
Queens is where Far Rockaway lies; as a boy he kept a laboratory in his room there and rigged up his own burglar alarm.
Q 04As a teenager in the Depression, Feynman earned pocket money in his neighbourhood by repairing what?
Radios
Radios: people who could not afford a repairman hired the boy instead, and one customer was astonished to watch him fix a set by pacing up and down and thinking.
Q 05What did Feynman's father Melville do for a living for most of Richard's childhood?
Sold uniforms
Sold uniforms, as a sales manager, after his own business ventures had failed; science was his real passion, and he wanted his first son to become a scientist.
Q 06Feynman's sister Joan was told as a girl that women's brains couldn't do science; what did she become?
An astrophysicist
An astrophysicist: one night Richard led her from bed to a golf course to watch the aurora, and she went on to help explain what causes the northern lights.
Q 07Asked why a ball rolled to the back of the wagon young Feynman was pulling, his father named which principle?
Inertia
Inertia: his father told him to look closely, and sure enough the ball was not going backwards at all; the wagon was moving off and its back end caught the ball up.
Q 08Why was Feynman turned down by Columbia University?
Its quota on Jewish students
Its quota on Jewish students was common practice then: when he later applied to Princeton, the physics head wrote to ask 'Is Feynman Jewish?' before taking him.
Q 09Where did Feynman do his undergraduate degree?
MIT
MIT suited him so well that he asked to stay on for his doctorate; the head of physics refused, telling him he should find out how the rest of the world looked.
Q 10Feynman switched from maths to which subject before deciding he had 'gone too far' and settling on physics?
Electrical engineering
Electrical engineering was his cure for maths that felt too abstract: he wanted to get his hands dirty, then decided within months that physics lay 'somewhere in between'.
Q 11Feynman scored perfectly on Princeton's physics entrance exam but did poorly in which sections?
History and English
History and English were his weak spots: as an undergraduate he had taken astronomy as his 'humanities' elective. Princeton's committee still let him in on his science scores.
Q 12Who was Feynman's PhD advisor at Princeton?
John Archibald Wheeler
John Archibald Wheeler once phoned his student at the Graduate College to announce why all electrons have the same charge and mass: 'Because they are all the same electron!'
Q 13Which three famous scientists were in the audience for Feynman's first Princeton seminar?
Q 21Feynman opened one Los Alamos cabinet by guessing a combination based on the digits of which constant?
Euler's number, e
Euler's number, e, gave him 27-18-28: he guessed the colleague was just the type to use a mathematical constant, and the same setting opened the man's other filing cabinets too.
Q 22Feynman borrowed a car to visit Arline from which colleague, later exposed as a Soviet spy?
Klaus Fuchs
Klaus Fuchs was a dormitory friend, and his car carried Feynman to Albuquerque the day Arline was dying. In 1950 Fuchs confessed to passing bomb secrets to the Soviet Union for years.
Q 23Feynman claimed to watch the Trinity test without dark glasses, looking through what instead?
A truck windshield
Einstein, Pauli and von Neumann
Einstein, Pauli and von Neumann all came to hear a graduate student. When Pauli objected and asked 'Don't you agree, Professor Einstein?', Einstein gave a soft, polite no.
Q 14Feynman pictured positrons as electrons doing what, an idea he took from a phone call with his Princeton advisor?
Moving backwards in time
Moving backwards in time was his advisor's suggestion on that call, with one electron zigzagging through history. Feynman doubted the rest but kept the positron picture: 'That, I stole!'
Q 15Feynman's first wife, Arline Greenbaum, was seriously ill with which disease when they married in 1942?
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis made even the wedding cautious: fearing contagion, he kissed her only on the cheek, then drove her straight to a hospital, where he visited at weekends.
Q 16Feynman and Arline were married in a city office in which part of New York, witnessed by two strangers?
Staten Island
Staten Island meant a ferry ride across New York Harbor, the only honeymoon voyage they got; no family or friends came, so the witnesses were called in from the next room.
Q 17Which physicist recruited Feynman into the atomic bomb effort at Princeton, to work on the isotron?
Robert R. Wilson
Robert R. Wilson broke secrecy to recruit him. Feynman refused, went back to his thesis for about three minutes, then turned up at the three o'clock meeting; the isotron itself was later abandoned.
Q 18At Los Alamos, Feynman worked in the Theoretical Division led by which physicist?
Hans Bethe
Hans Bethe wanted someone to argue with, and the newcomer obliged, shouting 'No, no, you're crazy'. It was just what Bethe needed, and it won Feynman a group leader's job.
Q 19Feynman helped set up a Los Alamos computation system that ran on IBM what?
Punched cards
Punched cards in a different colour for each problem let his team push two or three calculations through the IBM machines at once, one deck chasing another round the room.
Q 20What did Feynman dare his wife and father to send him at Los Alamos, alarming the military censors?
Letters in code
Letters in code were a game: he dared them to send ciphers he couldn't crack, with no key. The censors demanded a key be enclosed, then agreed to remove it before the letter reached him.
A truck windshield, he reasoned, would stop the ultraviolet that really harms eyes. The flash still made him duck, and the purple splotch he then saw was only an afterimage.
Q 24Which senior physicist sought Feynman out at Los Alamos because everyone else was too awed to argue with him?
Niels Bohr
Niels Bohr told his son that the 'little fellow in the back' was the only one not afraid of him, so the pair tried their ideas on Feynman first, before they would 'call in the big shots'.
Q 25After Los Alamos, Feynman left for which university in 1945, years before his long career at Caltech?
Cornell
Cornell moved first: his Los Alamos division chief had urged the hire back in 1943, while Berkeley stalled for two years despite Oppenheimer's pleas, until it was too late.
Q 26Which university gave Feynman a wartime assistant professorship that he held on leave and never took up?
Wisconsin
Wisconsin held the post for him on unpaid leave while he worked on the bomb; on a later visit he is said to have called it the only university with 'the good sense to fire me'.
Q 27What did Feynman come away with after Army psychiatrists examined him at his post-war draft physical?
A 4-F mental exemption
A 4-F mental exemption followed when one examiner noted that he heard voices and talked to his dead wife; an officer saw the 'D' for deficient and stamped him rejected without a word.
Q 28What tossed cafeteria object set Feynman analysing rotation, work that fed into his Nobel Prize?
A dinner plate
A dinner plate wobbled as it spun, and working out the two-to-one ratio of wobble to spin purely for fun pulled him out of a post-war slump.
Q 29At which 1948 conference did Feynman first show his diagrams to Dirac, Teller and Bohr?
Pocono
Pocono was a flop for him: after Schwinger's long, polished talk, Teller and Dirac kept interrupting, and Bohr rose to lecture him on the uncertainty principle.
Q 30Who convinced Oppenheimer that Feynman's formulation was easiest, publishing rules for it in 1949?
Freeman Dyson
Freeman Dyson had driven across America with Feynman the summer before, then caught a bus back east. His paper united the rival methods, and he became a professor without ever earning a doctorate.