Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Famous Scientists trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Science is a story of people: a friar counting pea plants, a bookbinder's apprentice who changed electricity, a physicist hunting counterfeiters for the Royal Mint. Every question here is about a person, what they found and the odd turn their life took. The fifty questions cover discoveries, Nobel Prizes, famous experiments, rivalries and quotes, from the household names to the people whose work was credited to someone else. Every answer comes with an explanation that adds the detail worth remembering. It suits a pub quiz round, a classroom starter or anyone who likes knowing who really found what.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which scientist alone has won Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, physics and chemistry?
Marie Curie
Marie Curie left notebooks so radioactive that they are kept in lead-lined boxes, and anyone consulting them must wear protective clothing.
Q 02Which physicist's Nobel Prize cited the photoelectric effect rather than his theory of relativity?
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein had already promised the prize money to his ex-wife Mileva Marić in their divorce settlement, two years before he won it.
Q 03Which Principia author spent his last decades at the Royal Mint prosecuting counterfeiters?
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton gathered evidence disguised as a bar-room regular and successfully prosecuted 28 coiners, including William Chaloner, who was hanged.
Q 04Which naturalist rushed to publish once Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay with the same idea?
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin and Wallace had their papers read jointly to the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858, while Darwin was attending his son's funeral.
Q 05Which astronomer did the Inquisition find 'vehemently suspect of heresy' and keep under house arrest?
Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei was rehabilitated only in 1992, when Pope John Paul II admitted that the theologians of the day had been in error.
Q 06Which inventor's alternating current fought Thomas Edison's direct current in the 'war of currents'?
Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla died alone in Room 3327 of the Hotel New Yorker in 1943, and the SI unit of magnetic flux density was named the tesla only in 1960.
Q 07Which chemist tested his rabies vaccine in 1885 on a nine-year-old boy mauled by a rabid dog?
Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur was not a licensed physician and risked prosecution by treating Joseph Meister, who was in good health three months later.
Q 08Which bacteriologist found mould killing bacteria on a culture plate left out during a 1928 holiday?
Alexander Fleming
Alexander Fleming muttered 'That's funny' at the plate, and shared the 1945 Nobel Prize with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain.
Q 09Which physicist, given about two years to live at 21, went on to write A Brief History of Time?
Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time sat on the Sunday Times bestseller list for a record 237 weeks.
Q 10Which daughter of Lord Byron wrote an algorithm for Charles Babbage's unbuilt Analytical Engine?
Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace's notes on the engine, published in 1843, ran about three times longer than the paper she was translating.
Q 11Whose DNA image, known as Photo 51, was shown to James Watson without her knowledge or permission?
Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Franklin died of ovarian cancer at 37 in 1958, four years before Watson, Crick and Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize.
Q 12Which friar found the laws of inheritance by growing some 28,000 plants, mostly peas, at his abbey?
Gregor Mendel
Gregor Mendel's 1866 paper was cited only about three times in 35 years, until botanists rediscovered his laws in 1900.
Q 13Which chemist left gaps in his 1869 periodic table for elements that had not yet been discovered?
Dmitri Mendeleev
Q 21Which astronomer, whose mother stood trial for witchcraft, showed planets orbit in ellipses, not circles?
Johannes Kepler
Johannes Kepler found the ellipse by wrestling for years with the orbit of Mars, publishing the result in Astronomia nova in 1609.
Q 22Which bookbinder's apprentice became Humphry Davy's lab assistant and discovered electromagnetic induction?
Michael Faraday
Michael Faraday turned down a knighthood, preferring to stay 'plain Mr Faraday to the end', and twice refused to be President of the Royal Society.
Q 23Which Scottish physicist unified electricity and magnetism and demonstrated the first colour photograph?
James Clerk Maxwell
Dmitri Mendeleev's predicted 'eka-aluminium' turned up as gallium in 1875, with almost exactly the properties he had forecast.
Q 14Which Bletchley codebreaker, prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts, received a royal pardon in 2013?
Alan Turing
Alan Turing's 1936 paper on computable numbers defined the Turing machine, still the model of a general-purpose computer.
Q 15Which physicist dropped an O-ring into ice water at a televised hearing into the 1986 Challenger disaster?
Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman, a bongo player who cracked safes at Los Alamos, shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for quantum electrodynamics.
Q 16Which physicist's 1935 thought experiment left a boxed cat both alive and dead to mock quantum orthodoxy?
Erwin Schrödinger
Erwin Schrödinger meant the cat as a reductio ad absurdum of the Copenhagen view, not as a serious possibility.
Q 17Which virologist, asked who owned the patent on his polio vaccine, replied 'Could you patent the sun?'
Jonas Salk
Jonas Salk vaccinated his own children in 1953, a year before a field trial that enrolled over 1.8 million schoolchildren.
Q 18Which doctor gave his gardener's eight-year-old son cowpox in 1796, then exposed the boy to smallpox?
Edward Jenner
Edward Jenner's term Variolae vaccinae, 'pustules of the cow', is where the word vaccine comes from.
Q 19Which Greek ran naked through Syracuse crying 'Eureka' after his bath showed how to test a gold crown?
Archimedes
Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier during the sack of Syracuse in 212 BC, reputedly while drawing figures in the dust.
Q 20Which astronomer's Sun-centred model appeared in De revolutionibus just before his death in 1543?
Nicolaus Copernicus
Nicolaus Copernicus, legend has it, was handed the final printed pages on the very day he died, waking from a stroke-induced coma to see them.
James Clerk Maxwell had a tartan ribbon photographed three times through red, green and blue filters for an 1861 Royal Institution lecture.
Q 24Which Swedish naturalist formalised the two-word Latin naming system that labels humans Homo sapiens?
Carl Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus is himself the official type specimen of Homo sapiens, the reference individual for the whole species.
Q 25Which German meteorologist proposed continental drift in 1912 and died on the Greenland ice in 1930?
Alfred Wegener
Alfred Wegener was buried where he fell, with his skis stuck upright in the snow; geologists dismissed him as an outsider until plate tectonics emerged.
Q 26Which geneticist found genes that jump position in maize, decades before her 1983 Nobel Prize in Medicine?
Barbara McClintock
Barbara McClintock was the first woman to win an unshared Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 35 years after she first saw maize genes transpose in 1948.
Q 27Which physicist explained nuclear fission with her nephew but was left out of Otto Hahn's Nobel Prize?
Lise Meitner
Lise Meitner was nominated 49 times across the chemistry and physics prizes without winning; element 109, meitnerium, was named for her in 1997.
Q 28Which primatologist first saw Gombe chimpanzees strip leaves from twigs to fish for termites in 1960?
Jane Goodall
Jane Goodall's mentor Louis Leakey replied, 'We must now redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human!'
Q 29Which marine biologist's book Silent Spring turned the pesticide DDT into a national scandal in 1962?
Rachel Carson
Rachel Carson died of a heart attack in 1964, weakened by breast cancer, eight years before the United States phased out DDT.
Q 30Which astronomer proposed the 'Pale Blue Dot' photograph of Earth that Voyager 1 took in 1990?
Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan also assembled the gold-plated plaque on Pioneer 10 in 1972, the first physical message sent into space.