Scientific Revolution
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50 free Scientific Revolution trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
In roughly 150 years, between Copernicus's book on the heavens in 1543 and Newton's Principia in 1687, Europeans changed how they asked questions about the world. Old authorities were tested against measurement and experiment, new instruments opened up the sky and the microscopic world, and an Earth that had sat still for two thousand years was set in motion. This quiz covers the people and ideas a history class expects: Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Descartes and Newton, the new anatomy and chemistry, the scientific societies, and the clash with the Church. It then follows those ideas into the Enlightenment. Along the way are the odd details that make the period stick, from duels and witch trials to royal patrons and a costly book about fish. It suits high school and AP European or world history students reviewing a unit, teachers who want a ready-made review round, and anyone curious about where modern science came from. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which planet did Galileo find circled by four moons in 1610, proof that not everything orbits Earth?
Jupiter
Jupiter's four large moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, are still called the Galilean moons. Many scholars at first refused to believe that anything could circle another planet.
Q 02After Galileo was found vehemently suspect of heresy in 1633, how did he spend the rest of his life?
Under house arrest
Under house arrest at his villa near Florence, Galileo still wrote Two New Sciences, a major reason Albert Einstein later called him the father of modern physics.
Q 03What closed Cambridge University in 1665, sending Isaac Newton home for two highly productive years?
The plague
The plague, then raging in London, shut the university as a precaution. At home in Woolsthorpe, Newton developed his first ideas on calculus, optics and the law of gravitation.
Q 04Which line did René Descartes publish in Discourse on the Method as the one truth beyond doubt?
I think, therefore I am
"I think, therefore I am" first appeared in French, as "Je pense, donc je suis", so that it could reach more readers than Latin allowed. The Latin cogito, ergo sum followed in 1644.
Q 05Isaac Newton told Robert Hooke in 1675 that he saw further by standing on the shoulders of what?
Giants
Giants were already proverbial: the poet George Herbert had recorded the saying that a dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees farther of the two.
Q 06What did Isaac Newton use in the 1660s to show that white light is a mixture of colors?
A glass prism
A glass prism spread sunlight into a band of colors that Newton named the spectrum. He then used a lens and a second prism to blend the colors back into white light.
Q 07Copernicus, who put the Sun at the center of the heavens, was born in which present-day country?
Poland
Poland's city of Toruń was his birthplace, though his parents spoke German. Legend says the final printed pages of his great book reached him on the very day he died.
Q 08Which Greek thinker's rule that heavy objects fall faster than light ones did Galileo help overturn?
Aristotle
Aristotle had taught that objects fall faster in direct proportion to their weight. Galileo argued instead that, with no air to resist them, all bodies would drop at the same speed.
Q 09Which secretive pursuit fills about a million words of the papers Isaac Newton never published?
Alchemy
Alchemy drew Newton into a hunt for the philosopher's stone, said to turn base metals into gold. The economist John Maynard Keynes, who bought many of the papers, called him the last of the magicians.
Q 10What did the astronomer Tycho Brahe lose in a 1566 sword duel and replace with metal for life?
Part of his nose
Part of his nose was sliced off by a cousin after a drunken quarrel over who was the better mathematician. Tests on his exhumed remains in 2012 showed the replacement was brass, not the silver and gold of legend.
Q 11Which English statesman argued in Novum Organum that knowledge must be built from observation?
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, who rose to be Lord Chancellor of England, has been called the father of empiricism. One old account says he caught a fatal chill while stuffing a hen with snow to test whether cold preserved meat.
Q 12Which German mathematician fought Isaac Newton in a bitter dispute over who first invented calculus?
Gottfried Leibniz
Gottfried Leibniz published his calculus first, and Newton's supporters accused him of plagiarism. His notation was judged the more convenient, and British mathematicians finally adopted it after 1820.
Q 13What shape did Kepler find for planetary orbits after some forty failed attempts with Mars data?
Q 21Which ancient astronomer wrote the Almagest, the Earth-centered guide trusted for over 1,200 years?
Ptolemy
Ptolemy wrote it in the second century as the Mathematical Treatise. Its familiar name comes through Arabic from megiste, the Greek word for greatest.
Q 22Which French teenager began building a mechanical calculator in 1642 to ease his father's tax work?
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal was 18 when he started, and he built some 50 prototypes before showing the machine to the public in 1645. It became known as the Pascaline.
Q 23Which instrument did Evangelista Torricelli invent in 1643 using a tube of mercury in a basin?
The barometer
Ellipses
Ellipses, with the Sun at one focus, became his first law of planetary motion. He had at first dismissed the shape as too simple for earlier astronomers to have overlooked.
Q 14Which astronomer paid to print Newton's Principia after the Royal Society overspent on a fish book?
Edmond Halley
Edmond Halley, the society's clerk and later famous for his comet, footed the bill himself. He was then told the society could no longer afford his promised salary of £50 a year.
Q 15Which Brussels-born anatomist corrected Galen in a 1543 book based on his own human dissections?
Andreas Vesalius
Andreas Vesalius found that Galen had cut open only animals, chiefly Barbary macaques, because ancient Rome did not allow human dissection. His illustrated Fabrica ran to seven books.
Q 16Which English physician showed in 1628 that the heart pumps blood around the body in a circuit?
William Harvey
William Harvey served as physician to both James I and Charles I. He estimated how much blood the heart expels with each beat, challenging the old view that the liver was the source of the blood in the veins.
Q 17What word did Robert Hooke coin in Micrographia for the tiny compartments he saw in a slice of cork?
Cell
Cell was Hooke's word for the pores of cork, which he wrote were much like a honeycomb. Samuel Pepys called Micrographia the most ingenious book he had ever read.
Q 18Which Dutch draper, using tiny lenses he made himself, became the first person to observe bacteria?
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek kept a draper's shop in Delft and never wrote a book. He reported his discoveries in rambling letters to the Royal Society in London, which published many of them.
Q 19René Descartes died in which country, where a queen had him give lessons at five in the morning?
Sweden
Sweden's Queen Christina had invited him to Stockholm and took her lessons before dawn in a cold, drafty castle. He is generally said to have died of pneumonia there in February 1650.
Q 20Which Catholic tribunal tried Galileo in 1633 for defending the view that Earth circles the Sun?
The Roman Inquisition
The Roman Inquisition had already condemned the Sun-centered theory in 1616. Galileo's 1632 Dialogue, which put the pope's own arguments in the mouth of a simpleton named Simplicio, brought him before it.
The barometer showed that the weight of the air can hold up a column of mercury about 76 centimeters tall. The pressure unit called the torr is named after its inventor.
Q 24Which Irish-born chemist gives his name to a law linking the pressure and volume of a gas?
Robert Boyle
Robert Boyle was born at Lismore Castle, the fourteenth child of the Earl of Cork. His book The Sceptical Chymist helped earn him a reputation as the first modern chemist.
Q 25Isaac Newton was born on which holiday in 1642, by the calendar England was then using?
Christmas Day
Christmas Day 1642 on England's old Julian calendar is 4 January 1643 on the modern one. His father, also named Isaac, had died three months before he was born.
Q 26Which relative did Kepler defend in court when she was accused of witchcraft in Württemberg?
His mother
His mother, Katharina, a healer and herbalist, was shown the instruments of torture yet refused to confess. Kepler handled her defense himself, and she was released.
Q 27Which Italian friar, who taught that the stars are distant suns, was burned at the stake in 1600?
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno also suggested that those distant suns had planets which might foster life of their own. He died in Rome's Campo de' Fiori, where a monument to him was unveiled in 1889.
Q 28Which French writer spread the tale of Newton's falling apple after hearing it from Newton's niece?
Voltaire
Voltaire heard the tale in London during his exile from France and retold it in his own writings. His later book on Newton's physics made the Englishman accessible to a far wider public.
Q 29Which pope acknowledged in 1992 that the Church had erred in condemning Galileo?
John Paul II
John Paul II spoke 359 years after the trial, closing a review he had called for in 1979. He said the theologians of Galileo's day had failed to separate the Bible from its interpretation.
Q 30Isaac Newton became the first scientist to be buried in which London church after his death in 1727?
Westminster Abbey
Westminster Abbey laid Newton in the nave after his body had lain in state in its Jerusalem Chamber. The ashes of Stephen Hawking now rest between his grave and that of Charles Darwin.