Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
60 free Famous Physicists trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This famous physicists trivia quiz is about the people rather than the equations. It runs from Archimedes and his bath through Galileo's Starry Messenger and house arrest, Newton's Principia and his years chasing counterfeiters at the Mint, to the giants of the 19th century — Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin, Boltzmann, Hertz and Röntgen, the first Nobel laureate. Then it moves into the quantum and nuclear age: Planck, Einstein, Bohr, de Broglie, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, Bose, Raman, Meitner, Fermi, Oppenheimer, Chadwick, Wu, Yukawa, Landau, Sakharov, Feynman, Gell-Mann, Bethe, Chandrasekhar, Hawking, Higgs and Kip Thorne. Expect questions on who discovered what, who won which prize for what, and the human details — the O-ring in the ice water, the bongos, the ashes in Westminster Abbey. About a third are easy; the rest reward people who read biographies. Our physics and Hubble Space Telescope pages go deeper on the science. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia's biographies and the sources they cite, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 1687 book by Isaac Newton set out the laws of motion and universal gravitation?
Principia Mathematica
Its full title is Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica; it achieved the first great unification in physics.
Q 02With which German mathematician does Newton share credit for inventing calculus?
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Newton developed it years earlier but the bitter priority dispute poisoned relations between British and continental mathematics for a century.
Q 03What government post did Newton hold for the last 30 years of his life?
Master of the Mint
He took the job in 1699 on the death of Thomas Neale and pursued counterfeiters with relish.
Q 04Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize was awarded specifically for which discovery?
The photoelectric effect
Relativity was still too controversial for the committee; the photoelectric work helped launch quantum theory.
Q 05Where was Einstein working when he published his four groundbreaking papers of 1905?
The Swiss Patent Office in Bern
The 'annus mirabilis' papers came from a patent clerk who had just submitted his PhD to Zurich.
Q 06Galileo published his first telescopic discoveries in 1610 in a treatise called what?
Sidereus Nuncius
The Starry Messenger reported the moons of Jupiter, lunar craters and the stars of the Milky Way.
Q 07After his trial, Galileo spent his final years under house arrest at his villa where?
Arcetri, near Florence
He had defended Copernicanism in the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems; the Inquisition had first investigated him in 1615.
Q 08Marie Curie is the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in which two different sciences?
Physics and Chemistry
Physics in 1903 with Pierre and Becquerel, Chemistry alone in 1911 for radium and polonium.
Q 09Marie Curie died in 1934 of what, most likely caused by her years of radiation exposure?
Aplastic anaemia
In 1995 she became the first woman entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon.
Q 10The Copenhagen institute of the atomic-model pioneer predicted the properties of which element, named for the city?
Hafnium
Hafnia is the Latin name for Copenhagen; the institute opened in 1920.
Q 11Which principle, that things behave as waves or particles but not both at once, dominated Bohr's thinking?
Complementarity
It shaped his philosophy as much as his physics.
Q 12Richard Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for work on which theory?
Quantum electrodynamics
He shared it with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga; his diagrams are still the standard way to draw particle interactions.
Q 13Feynman became known to the wider public in the 1980s as a member of the commission investigating what?
The Challenger disaster
Q 21Paul Dirac's 1928 equation predicted the existence of what?
Antimatter
It married special relativity to quantum mechanics; his 1926 doctorate was the first ever thesis on quantum mechanics.
Q 22Enrico Fermi's Chicago Pile-1 achieved the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction on which date?
2 December 1942
It was built under the stands of a disused football stadium; particles obeying the exclusion principle are called fermions after him.
Q 23J. Robert Oppenheimer directed which wartime laboratory, earning the label 'father of the atomic bomb'?
Los Alamos
He read the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit, and lost his security clearance in a 1954 hearing.
On the Rogers Commission he famously dunked an O-ring in ice water on live television; he also played bongos in pit orchestras.
Q 14Max Planck won the 1918 Nobel Prize for the discovery of what?
Energy quanta
The Kaiser Wilhelm Society he twice led was renamed the Max Planck Society in 1948.
Q 15Maxwell's equations unified electricity, magnetism and what?
Light
He also correctly argued that Saturn's rings are made of countless small particles, winning the 1859 Adams Prize.
Q 16Which quantity has an SI measure named after Michael Faraday?
Capacitance
The self-taught bookbinder's apprentice discovered electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism and benzene.
Q 17Which Cambridge chair, once held by Newton and Dirac, did Stephen Hawking occupy from 1979 to 2009?
Lucasian Professor of Mathematics
His ashes were interred in Westminster Abbey between the graves of Newton and Darwin.
Q 18How long did A Brief History of Time stay on the Sunday Times bestseller list?
A record 237 weeks
Hawking was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at 21 and later spoke through a device controlled by a single cheek muscle.
Q 19Which physicist coined 'quantum entanglement' in 1935 and is known for a cat thought experiment?
Erwin Schrödinger
His equation calculates a system's wave function; his book What Is Life? inspired a generation of molecular biologists.
Q 20Werner Heisenberg received the 1932 Nobel Prize 'for the creation of' what?
Quantum mechanics
He published the uncertainty principle in 1927 and later led the German nuclear programme during the war.
Q 24Under whom did Oppenheimer earn his doctorate at Göttingen in 1927?
Max Born
The Born–Oppenheimer approximation for molecular wave functions came out of that partnership.
Q 25Ernest Rutherford, the 'father of nuclear physics', won his 1908 Nobel Prize in which subject?
Chemistry
The New Zealander discovered half-life and radon, named alpha and beta radiation, and proposed the atomic nucleus in 1911.
Q 26Which two assistants performed Rutherford's gold foil experiment?
Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden
Geiger later gave his name to the radiation counter.
Q 27Nikola Tesla is best known for his contributions to which system of electricity supply?
Alternating current
His AC induction motor patents, licensed by Westinghouse in 1888, became the cornerstone of the polyphase system.
Q 28Which Austrian-Swedish physicist helped explain nuclear fission yet never won a Nobel Prize?
Lise Meitner
Element 109, meitnerium, was named for her in 1997; she lost her Berlin post in 1935 under the Nuremberg Laws.
Q 29Emmy Noether's famous theorem connects conservation laws to what?
Symmetries
Einstein and Weyl called her the most important woman in the history of mathematics.
Q 30Chien-Shiung Wu's famous experiment proved that what is not conserved?
Parity
Her colleagues Lee and Yang got the 1957 Nobel; she received the first Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978.