70 free Richard Feynman trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 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.
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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
His pictorial diagrams for the theory's calculations are still used throughout particle physics.
Q 03In which borough of New York City was Feynman born in 1918?
Queens
The family later moved to Far Rockaway, where he ran a home laboratory and repaired radios.
Q 04Feynman was a late talker. He did not speak until after which birthday?
His third
As an adult his New York accent was so strong that Pauli and Bethe said he talked like a 'bum'.
Q 05What did Feynman's father Melville do for a living?
Sold uniforms
He declared 'If it's a boy, he'll be a scientist' before Richard was born, and taught him to question orthodox thinking.
Q 06Feynman's younger sister Joan, whose interest in astronomy he encouraged, became what?
An astrophysicist
He took her to see the aurora in Far Rockaway; she went on to help explain what causes the northern lights.
Q 07An IQ test at Feynman's high school put his score at what?
125
Biographer James Gleick called it 'merely respectable'; his sister scored one point higher, and he later declined Mensa saying his IQ was too low.
Q 08Why was Feynman turned down by Columbia University?
Its quota on Jewish students
Princeton's physics head later asked whether he was Jewish before admitting him for graduate work.
Q 09Where did Feynman do his undergraduate degree?
MIT
He joined the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity and published two papers in the Physical Review before graduating in 1939.
Q 10Feynman switched from maths to which subject before deciding it had 'gone too far' and settling on physics?
Electrical engineering
Physics, he said, was 'somewhere in between'.
Q 11Feynman scored perfectly on Princeton's physics entrance exam but did poorly in which sections?
History and English
It was described as an unprecedented feat in physics; his maths score was also outstanding.
Q 12Who was Feynman's PhD advisor at Princeton?
John Archibald Wheeler
Their absorber theory of electrodynamics drove Feynman toward the path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics.
Q 13Which three physicists were in the audience for Feynman's first Princeton seminar?
Einstein, Pauli and von Neumann
Q 21Feynman opened one Los Alamos cabinet by guessing a combination based on the digits of which constant?
e
The lock was set to 27-18-28, from e = 2.71828, exactly the sort of number he figured a physicist would choose.
Q 22Feynman borrowed a car to visit Arline from which colleague, later exposed as a Soviet spy?
Klaus Fuchs
Asked who was most likely a spy, Fuchs pointed to Feynman's safe-cracking and frequent trips to Albuquerque.
Q 23Feynman claimed to watch the Trinity test without dark glasses, looking through what instead?
A truck windshield
He reasoned the glass would block the ultraviolet; the flash still made him duck to the floor with a purple afterimage.
Pauli warned the theory would be hard to quantize; Einstein suggested trying it on gravity.
Q 14A key insight in Feynman's thesis was that positrons behave like electrons doing what?
Moving backwards in time
The idea underlies the arrows in his diagrams and his 1949 paper 'The Theory of Positrons'.
Q 15Feynman's first wife, Arline Greenbaum, was seriously ill with which disease when they married in 1942?
Tuberculosis
It was incurable at the time; he could kiss her only on the cheek at the ceremony and took her straight to hospital afterwards.
Q 16Feynman and Arline were married in a city office in which part of New York, witnessed by two strangers?
Staten Island
Neither family nor friends attended; they took the ferry there on June 29, 1942.
Q 17Which physicist recruited Feynman into the atomic bomb effort at Princeton, to work on the isotron?
Robert R. Wilson
The isotron was meant to separate uranium isotopes electromagnetically; the project was dropped on Lawrence's advice.
Q 18At Los Alamos, Feynman worked in the Theoretical Division led by which physicist?
Hans Bethe
Together they produced the Bethe-Feynman formula for the yield of a fission bomb.
Q 19Feynman helped set up a Los Alamos computation system that ran on IBM what?
Punched cards
A drummer, he also worked out how to make the machines click in musical rhythms.
Q 20How did Feynman amuse himself in the isolation of Los Alamos?
Cracking colleagues' safes
He left notes inside one colleague's cabinets, convincing him a spy had been at his research.
Q 24Which senior physicist sought Feynman out at Los Alamos because everyone else was too awed to argue with him?
Niels Bohr
Feynman had no such inhibitions, which may be why the older man never quite warmed to him.
Q 25After Los Alamos, Feynman took up a professorship at which university in 1945?
Cornell
He later said he lived in the shadow of Hans Bethe there and hated the Ithaca winters.
Q 26Feynman joked that which university was 'the only university that ever had the good sense to fire me'?
Wisconsin
He nominally held an assistant professorship there during the war and never returned to take it up.
Q 27What did Army psychiatrists give Feynman at his post-war draft physical?
A 4-F mental exemption
They diagnosed him with a mental illness, a story he later told with relish.
Q 28What tossed cafeteria object set Feynman analysing rotation, work that fed into his Nobel Prize?
A dinner plate
He was working for fun after his father's death, and was surprised when job offers poured in.
Q 29At which 1948 conference did Feynman first show his diagrams to Dirac, Teller and Bohr?
Pocono
Schwinger's long presentation had gone first; Feynman failed to get his point across at all.
Q 30Who convinced Oppenheimer that Feynman's formulation was easiest, publishing rules for it in 1949?
Freeman Dyson
He showed that Tomonaga, Schwinger and Feynman were all saying the same thing, even if nobody else understood any of them.