Q 01/05

Albert Einstein held a day job at what kind of workplace when he published special relativity in 1905?

A) A university

B) A patent office

C) A secondary school

D) An insurance firm

Answer · why

B) A patent office

A patent office in Switzerland employed Einstein as an assistant examiner. The inventions that crossed his desk there included a gravel sorter and an ...

Q 02/05

Which navigation technology would drift by over 10 kilometres a day if its clocks ignored the effects of relativity?

A) Radar

B) Sonar

C) LORAN

D) GPS

Answer · why

D) GPS

GPS satellite clocks run about 38 microseconds a day fast: their speed slows them, but their height above Earth speeds them up by more. The system is ...

Q 03/05

In which classic film do astronauts on a near-light-speed voyage land some two thousand years after their launch?

A) Planet of the Apes

B) 2001: A Space Odyssey

C) Silent Running

D) Forbidden Planet

Answer · why

A) Planet of the Apes

Planet of the Apes has the ship's chronometer read 3978 as the crew abandon it, about two millennia after their 1972 departure. Relativity lets a fast...

Q 04/05

Which metal owes its colour to relativity, because its innermost electrons move at over half the speed of light?

A) Copper

B) Cobalt

C) Gold

D) Bismuth

Answer · why

C) Gold

Gold would be silvery like most other metals if relativity did not apply. Its innermost electrons travel at about 58% of light speed.

Q 05/05

Albert Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for explaining what, rather than for relativity?

A) Brownian motion

B) The specific heat of solids

C) Black-body radiation

D) The photoelectric effect

Answer · why

D) The photoelectric effect

The photoelectric effect is named in his Nobel citation, and relativity is not. The 1921 prize was actually awarded a year late, in 1922.