Q 01/05

Schrödinger's 1935 thought experiment has a Geiger counter release a hammer onto a flask of which poison?

A) Hydrocyanic acid

B) Arsenic trioxide

C) Strychnine

D) Mercury chloride

Answer · why

A) Hydrocyanic acid

Hydrocyanic acid in a small flask puts the cat's life at the mercy of one atom's random decay. Schrödinger called the case burlesque: he offered it as...

Q 02/05

Albert Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics cited which discovery, rather than his theory of relativity?

A) Brownian motion

B) Photoelectric effect

C) Mass–energy equivalence

D) Bose–Einstein statistics

Answer · why

B) Photoelectric effect

The photoelectric effect won because the Nobel committee still doubted relativity, so the citation pointedly avoided it. Einstein had already promised...

Q 03/05

Einstein's 1926 letter saying God does not play dice went to which pioneer of the wave function's statistical reading?

A) Pascual Jordan

B) Werner Heisenberg

C) Max Born

D) Paul Ehrenfest

Answer · why

C) Max Born

Max Born, whose probability rule the remark questioned, waited until 1954 for a Nobel Prize awarded 'especially for his statistical interpretation of ...

Q 04/05

Which polymath, a Rosetta Stone decipherer, devised the two-slit experiment that shows light interfering like a wave?

A) Isaac Newton

B) Thomas Young

C) Jean-François Champollion

D) Christiaan Huygens

Answer · why

B) Thomas Young

Thomas Young's wave theory met scepticism in England because it contradicted Newton, yet his two-slit setup later showed even single electrons buildin...

Q 05/05

Max Planck's 1900 idea that energy comes in discrete quanta was devised to fit the spectrum of what?

A) Black-body radiation

B) Cherenkov radiation

C) Synchrotron radiation

D) Infrared radiation

Answer · why

A) Black-body radiation

Black-body radiation from a heated cavity refused to match classical physics, which predicted infinite energy at high frequencies, the so-called ultra...