Waves (Physics)
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50 free Waves (Physics) trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Waves are how most of what we know about the world reaches us. Every sound, every color, every phone call and every earthquake tremor arrives as a wave, and the same handful of rules describes them all, whether they cross a pond or cross the universe. This quiz covers those rules from the ground up: the parts of a wave and how they are measured, the main types of wave and how they differ, and what happens when a wave meets a wall, a gap, a new material or another wave. It also takes in sound and hearing, the family of waves that includes light, the waves of the sea and of earthquakes, and the scientists who worked it all out. It is written for physics and physical science students revising a waves unit, for teachers who want a ready-made worksheet with answers, and for anyone curious about why sirens change as they pass or why a straw looks bent in a glass. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the quiz works as a study guide as well as a test.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Japanese word meaning "harbor wave" names the giant ocean waves set off by undersea earthquakes?
Tsunami
Tsunami joins the Japanese words for harbor and wave. Far out at sea one can slip under a ship almost unnoticed, then rear up as it reaches shallow water near the coast.
Q 02A cork bobs up and down as ripples pass instead of drifting along, because waves transfer what rather than matter?
Energy
Energy is what a wave moves from place to place, while the material it passes through never strays far from where it started. Waves also carry momentum and information.
Q 03Which phenomenon, named after an Austrian physicist, makes an ambulance siren sound lower once it has passed?
Doppler effect
The Doppler effect carries the name of Christian Doppler, who proposed it in 1842 to explain the colors of double stars rather than sound.
Q 04A singer can shatter a wine glass by holding a note at the glass's natural frequency, an example of what?
Resonance
Resonance makes a vibration grow when each push arrives in time with an object's natural rhythm. A playground swing climbs higher for the same reason when every shove is timed to its swing.
Q 05A jet flying faster than sound drags a cone-shaped shock wave behind it that people on the ground hear as what?
A sonic boom
A sonic boom is not a one-off bang made at the moment a plane breaks the sound barrier. It follows the aircraft for the whole supersonic flight, sweeping a strip of ground known as the boom carpet.
Q 06A wall must stand at least about 17 meters away before a listener can hear which effect as a separate sound?
An echo
An echo from any closer returns less than a tenth of a second after the shout, too soon for the ear to tell the two apart. In Greek myth, Echo was a nymph cursed to repeat only the last words spoken to her.
Q 07Which type of sunglasses cuts road glare by blocking light waves that vibrate in the horizontal direction?
Polarized
Polarized lenses block the side-to-side vibration that dominates glare bouncing off a wet road or a lake. One test for a pair is to look through two at once, with one turned a quarter turn against the other.
Q 08Which Austrian physicist, famous for a thought experiment about a cat, wrote the wave equation of quantum theory?
Erwin Schrödinger
Erwin Schrödinger worked on the equation during a Christmas 1925 retreat in the Swiss Alps and published it the next year. It led to his Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933.
Q 09Which ripples in spacetime, predicted by Albert Einstein, were first detected in 2015 from two colliding black holes?
Gravitational waves
Gravitational waves are so faint that Einstein himself doubted they could ever be detected. The 2015 signal had been traveling for more than a billion years when it reached Earth.
Q 10Which name is given to the highest point of a wave, the part that overturns when a wave breaks on a beach?
The crest
The crest grows steeper as a wave runs up a sloping seabed until it becomes unstable and spills forward. Whitewater tumbling down the front of the wave is the result.
Q 11A sailor measures wave height from the top of a wave straight down to which lowest point?
The trough
The trough is the bottom of the dip between two waves, so a wave's height is counted from there to the top. That makes it double the wave's rise above calm water.
Q 12A wave's speed equals its frequency multiplied by which distance, measured from one peak to the next?
Wavelength
Wavelength is usually written with the Greek letter lambda. At a fixed speed it shrinks as the frequency climbs, so the faster a wave vibrates, the more tightly packed its peaks are.
Q 13The A in AM radio stands for which wave property, the one linked to how loud a sound is?
Amplitude
Q 21Which wave behavior, named by the Italian scientist Francesco Grimaldi, lets a shout be heard from behind a tree?
Diffraction
Diffraction is the spreading of waves around an obstacle or through a gap. Grimaldi coined the word from the Latin for breaking into pieces, after watching light fan out in different directions.
Q 22Noise-cancelling headphones kill a hum by playing its mirror image, so the two sounds cancel through which process?
Interference
Interference is what happens whenever two waves overlap and add together. The headphones play a copy of the noise flipped upside down, so each peak meets a dip and the two wipe each other out.
Q 23The law of reflection says a mirror throws light back at an angle equal to the angle of what?
Incidence
Amplitude is the size of a wave's swing away from its rest position, and an AM station varies it to carry speech and music. AM was the earliest method used to broadcast audio by radio.
Q 14The unit of frequency, one cycle per second, honors which German physicist who first proved radio waves exist?
Heinrich Hertz
Heinrich Hertz saw no use for the invisible waves he produced in his laboratory. Asked what his discovery might be good for, he replied, "Nothing, I guess."
Q 15The time a wave takes to complete one full cycle, equal to one divided by its frequency, is called what?
Period
Period is the flip side of frequency. A heart beating 120 times a minute, or twice a second, has one of half a second.
Q 16Tightening a guitar string raises the frequency of the sound wave it makes, which raises which quality of the note?
Pitch
Pitch is the ear's reading of frequency, so faster vibrations sound higher. Human hearing runs from about 20 vibrations a second up to about 20,000, and the upper limit falls with age.
Q 17Sound and ocean waves both need a material to travel through, which places them in which class of wave?
Mechanical
Mechanical waves are vibrations of matter itself, which is why no sound can cross the emptiness of space. Light needs no such carrier and reaches Earth from the Sun through a vacuum.
Q 18In a transverse wave, such as a ripple sent along a rope, the rope moves which way relative to the wave's travel?
At right angles
At right angles is the rule for every transverse wave, light included: the vibration runs across the line of travel. Flick one end of a tied rope up and down and the hump runs along it while the rope only rises and falls.
Q 19Sound in air squeezes and stretches the air along its direction of travel, which makes it which type of wave?
Longitudinal
Longitudinal waves shake a material back and forth along the line of travel instead of across it. Sound in air is one, a train of pressure pulses moving at about 343 meters per second.
Q 20A pen dipped in water looks bent at the surface because of which wave behavior, caused by light changing speed?
Refraction
Refraction happens because light slows as it passes from air into water, and a wave that changes speed at an angle swings onto a new heading. Camera lenses and the human eye both use it to steer light.
Incidence means the arrival of the incoming ray. Both angles are measured from the normal, an imaginary line drawn straight out from the mirror's surface.
Q 24Which cables carry internet data as pulses of light, kept inside the glass by total internal reflection?
Optical fibers
Optical fibers are strands of glass about as thick as a human hair. Light inside strikes the wall at too shallow an angle to escape, so it bounces along the core instead of leaking out.
Q 25Light bending through layers of hot air above a desert road creates which illusion of a shimmering pool of water?
A mirage
A mirage is a real effect of light rather than a hallucination, so a camera can capture it. The "water" on a hot road is in fact a displaced image of the sky.
Q 26Isaac Newton showed that white sunlight is a mix of colors by passing a beam through which piece of glass?
A prism
A prism bends each color by a different angle, fanning white light into a spectrum, a word Newton himself chose. He then merged the colors back into white with a lens and a second one.
Q 27Light passing straight through a clear window, rather than bouncing off or soaking in, shows which wave behavior?
Transmission
Transmission is one of three fates for light striking a surface, alongside bouncing off and being soaked up. Plate glass and clean water let most light through, which is what makes them transparent.
Q 28Which technology, first developed to hunt submarines, finds underwater objects by timing reflected pulses of sound?
Sonar
Sonar is short for sound navigation and ranging. Navies had a working system by 1918, built to answer the submarine threat of World War I.
Q 29A plucked guitar string vibrates in loops between its two fixed ends, forming which kind of wave?
Standing
Standing waves form when a wave and its returning twin overlap, here running between the two ends of the string. Franz Melde coined the term around 1860 after experiments with vibrating strings.
Q 30Which electromagnetic waves, given off by radioactive atoms, sit at the high-frequency end of the spectrum?
Gamma rays
Gamma rays pass through most materials so easily that shielding takes dense lead or concrete. Paul Villard discovered them in 1900 while studying the radiation given off by radium.