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, also called prussic acid, kills with a single whiff, so the cat's fate hangs on one atom's random decay. Schrödinger meant the setup...

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 'He does not play dice' of 1926 targeted which physicist's statistical reading of the wave function?

A) Niels Bohr

B) Werner Heisenberg

C) Max Born

D) Paul Ehrenfest

Answer · why

C) Max Born

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

Q 04/05

Which polymath, a Rosetta Stone decipherer, first demonstrated two-slit interference of light?

A) Isaac Newton

B) Thomas Young

C) Michael Faraday

D) Christiaan Huygens

Answer · why

B) Thomas Young

Thomas Young's fringes overturned Newton's particle view of light, and the same two-slit setup later showed single electrons interfering with themselv...

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...