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60 free Enrico Fermi trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Enrico Fermi trivia quiz covers the last physicist who was equally at home at the blackboard and the workbench. The easy questions handle the reactor under the stadium, the Nobel Prize, the neutrino, fermions and the paradox about aliens. From there it moves through the life: the market-stall physics book, the mentor who tested him with geometry, the Pisa pranks, the doctorate at 20, the Rome group with a street for a nickname and the racial laws that sent him to New York straight from Stockholm. The harder end covers the elements he thought he had discovered, the chemist who suggested otherwise, the paraffin and the wooden table, the Navy's $1,500, the coded phone call about the Italian navigator, the xenon that shut down Hanford, the strips of paper at Trinity, the report against the hydrogen bomb and the test debris that gave us fermium. Every answer was checked against Fermi's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our physics and Manhattan Project quizzes are the natural next stop.
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Q 01On which date did Fermi's Chicago Pile-1 achieve the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction?
2 December 1942
Compton phoned Harvard in code: 'the Italian navigator has just landed in the new world'.
Q 02In which year did Fermi win the Nobel Prize in Physics, at the age of 37?
1938
He collected it in Stockholm and sailed straight on to New York rather than return to Fascist Italy.
Q 03Fermi's Nobel citation mentioned nuclear reactions brought about by what?
Slow neutrons
He had found that neutrons slowed by paraffin or water were far more easily captured by nuclei.
Q 04In which city was Fermi born in 1901?
Rome
His father was a division head in the Ministry of Railways and his mother a schoolteacher.
Q 05Fermi's father Alberto was a division head in which government ministry?
Railways
It was through a colleague of his father's, Adolfo Amidei, that the boy found his first mentor.
Q 06The 900-page physics book the young Fermi found at a Rome market was written in which language?
Latin
The Jesuit author's 1840 text covered mechanics, astronomy, optics and acoustics.
Q 07Fermi's mentor Adolfo Amidei first tested the boy with a book on which branch of mathematics?
Projective geometry
He returned it two months later having solved every problem, and Amidei declared him a prodigy.
Q 08Fermi attended the Scuola Normale Superiore in which Italian city?
Pisa
He came first in the entrance exam with an essay on the characteristics of sound.
Q 09In his entrance essay, the 17-year-old Fermi used Fourier analysis on a vibrating what?
Rod
The examiner declared afterwards that he would become an outstanding physicist.
Q 10Which fellow student became Fermi's prank partner at Pisa and lifelong collaborator?
Franco Rasetti
The two were later joined in Rome by Segre, Amaldi, Majorana and Pontecorvo.
Q 11At what unusually young age did Fermi receive his doctorate in 1922?
20
The thesis had to be experimental, on X-ray diffraction, because theoretical physics was not yet a discipline in Italy.
Q 12In 1923 Fermi first pointed out that which equation concealed enormous nuclear energy?
E = mc²
He added that releasing it would probably 'smash into smithereens the physicist who had the misfortune to find a way to do it'.
Q 13After a semester with Max Born in Gottingen, Fermi studied under Paul Ehrenfest in which Dutch city?
Leiden
There he met Lorentz and Einstein and befriended Samuel Goudsmit and the future economist Jan Tinbergen.
Q 21In how many different elements had Fermi induced radioactivity by March 1934?
22
He started with platinum and failed, then succeeded with aluminium and fluorine.
Q 22The Rome neutron experiments mysteriously worked better on a table made of what?
Wood
The hydrogen in the wood was slowing the neutrons, the clue that led to the paraffin discovery.
Q 23Passing neutrons through paraffin wax increased the radioactivity induced in silver by roughly how much?
A hundredfold
Fermi guessed the hydrogen atoms in the wax were slowing the neutrons, and confirmed it with water.
Fermi concluded that neutrons were slowed by collisions with atoms of which element?
Q 14Particles that obey the Pauli exclusion principle are named after Fermi. What are they called?
Fermions
Dirac derived the same statistics independently, hence Fermi-Dirac statistics.
Q 15Which Mussolini cabinet member engineered a new chair of theoretical physics in Rome for Fermi in 1926?
Orso Mario Corbino
He also chaired the selection committee and helped Fermi recruit his team.
Q 16Fermi's Rome group were nicknamed the 'Via Panisperna boys'. What was Via Panisperna?
The street of their institute
The team included Amaldi, Pontecorvo, Majorana and Segre.
Q 17Weeks after Mussolini named him to the Royal Academy in 1929, Fermi joined which movement?
The Fascist Party
He turned against Fascism when the 1938 racial laws threatened his Jewish wife.
Q 18What name did Fermi give to the uncharged particle Pauli had postulated to explain beta decay?
Neutrino
It was not detected until after his death; his own theory explained why it was so elusive.
Q 19The journal Nature rejected Fermi's beta-decay paper as containing speculations that were what?
'Too remote from physical reality'
The theory appeared in Italian and German before it was ever published in English.
Q 20Which German physicist came to Rome on a Rockefeller fellowship and co-wrote a 1932 paper with Fermi?
Hans Bethe
Foreign students arriving in Rome were a sign that Corbino's plan to raise Italian physics was working.
Hydrogen
The lighter the nucleus struck, the more energy a neutron loses per collision.
Q 25Fermi named the two 'new elements' he believed he had made from uranium ausenium and what?
Hesperium
They turned out to be fission products, an embarrassment he footnoted in his Nobel speech.
Q 26Which chemist suggested in 1934 that Fermi's uranium experiments made lighter, not heavier, elements?
Ida Noddack
Nobody took the idea seriously; five years later fission proved her right.
Q 27After collecting his Nobel Prize in Stockholm in December 1938, where did Fermi go instead of home?
New York
The family applied for permanent residency; five universities offered him jobs on arrival.
Q 28Italy's 1938 racial laws drove Fermi abroad because his wife Laura was what?
Jewish
The laws also put many of his research assistants out of work.
Q 29Which university did Fermi join on arriving in America in January 1939?
Columbia
He had already given summer lectures there in 1936.
Q 30Fermi credited which colleague with rushing in to say Bohr had 'leaked out great news' about fission?
Willis Lamb
Rabi always said he had told Fermi himself.