Q 01/05

Which honour, awarded to Planck a year late in 1919, cited 'his discovery of energy quanta'?

A) Copley Medal

B) Nobel Prize

C) Lorentz Medal

D) Franklin Medal

Answer · why

B) Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prize in Physics for 1918. By then quanta were at the heart of the new physics, yet Planck had spent years trying to fit them back into clas...

Q 02/05

In which German city was Planck born in 1858?

A) Munich

B) Berlin

C) Kiel

D) Hamburg

Answer · why

C) Kiel

Kiel. His family left for Munich in 1867, when his father took up a chair there, and Planck came back in 1885 for his own first professorship.

Q 03/05

Planck's radiation formula of 1900 explained the spectrum of light given off by which idealised object?

A) A black body

B) An ideal gas

C) A perfect mirror

D) A point charge

Answer · why

A) A black body

A black body. Its glow depends only on its temperature, not on what it is made of, so explaining it promised a truly universal result, the kind of cer...

Q 04/05

Planck's father was a university professor of which subject?

A) Theology

B) Medicine

C) Physics

D) Law

Answer · why

D) Law

Law. His father's standing as a jurist helped Planck too: by his own account he owed his first professorship, in 1885, less to his research than to a ...

Q 05/05

Planck's earliest memories included Prussian and Austrian troops marching into his home town in 1864 to fight which country?

A) France

B) Italy

C) Sweden

D) Denmark

Answer · why

D) Denmark

Denmark. Prussia and Austria took the Danish crown's southern duchies in that war, then fell out over how to run them and went to war with each other ...