Q 01/05

The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope stands near the summit of which Hawaiian mountain?

A) Mauna Loa

B) Kilauea

C) Mauna Kea

D) Haleakala

Answer · why

C) Mauna Kea

Mauna Kea. Its 15-metre dish is the largest built to work at submillimetre wavelengths, and it is one of the linked telescopes behind the Event Horizo...

Q 02/05

Maxwell's unification of light and electricity led him to predict the existence of what?

A) Black holes

B) Neutrinos

C) Gravitational waves

D) Radio waves

Answer · why

D) Radio waves

Radio waves. He never saw them: he died in 1879, and it was only in the following decade that laboratory experiments with electric sparks produced the...

Q 03/05

Which 1865 paper showed electric and magnetic fields travel as waves at the speed of light?

A) On Physical Lines of Force

B) A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism

C) A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field

D) On Faraday's Lines of Force

Answer · why

C) A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field

In it he wrote that light "is an electromagnetic disturbance propagated through the field according to electromagnetic laws".

Q 04/05

Richard Feynman predicted that Maxwell's laws of electrodynamics would one day outshine which war of the same decade?

A) The Crimean War

B) The American Civil War

C) The Franco-Prussian War

D) The Opium Wars

Answer · why

B) The American Civil War

The American Civil War. Seen from ten thousand years on, Feynman told his students, it would "pale into provincial insignificance" beside the 1860s' r...

Q 05/05

Who reduced Maxwell's twenty equations to the four now known as Maxwell's equations?

A) Oliver Heaviside

B) Lord Kelvin

C) Lord Rayleigh

D) George Stokes

Answer · why

A) Oliver Heaviside

Oliver Heaviside. A telegraph operator who had left school at 16, he found Maxwell's Treatise so gripping that he gave up his job to master it, then r...