Q 01/05

Which planet did Galileo find circled by four moons in 1610, proof that not everything orbits Earth?

A) Jupiter

B) Saturn

C) Mars

D) Mercury

Answer · why

A) Jupiter

Jupiter's four large moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, are still called the Galilean moons. Many scholars at first refused to believe that any...

Q 02/05

After Galileo was found vehemently suspect of heresy in 1633, how did he spend the rest of his life?

A) In a papal prison

B) Confined to a monastery

C) Under house arrest

D) In exile abroad

Answer · why

C) Under house arrest

Under house arrest at his villa near Florence, Galileo still wrote Two New Sciences, a major reason Albert Einstein later called him the father of mod...

Q 03/05

What closed Cambridge University in 1665, sending Isaac Newton home for two highly productive years?

A) A great fire

B) The plague

C) The Civil War

D) A royal decree

Answer · why

B) The plague

The plague, then raging in London, shut the university as a precaution. At home in Woolsthorpe, Newton developed his first ideas on calculus, optics a...

Q 04/05

Which line did René Descartes publish in Discourse on the Method as the one truth beyond doubt?

A) Knowledge itself is power

B) Man is the measure

C) Nature abhors a vacuum

D) I think, therefore I am

Answer · why

D) I think, therefore I am

"I think, therefore I am" first appeared in French, as "Je pense, donc je suis", so that it could reach more readers than Latin allowed. The Latin cog...

Q 05/05

Isaac Newton told Robert Hooke in 1675 that he saw further by standing on the shoulders of what?

A) Giants

B) Angels

C) Prophets

D) Ancients

Answer · why

A) Giants

Giants were already proverbial: the poet George Herbert had recorded the saying that a dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees farther of the two.