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60 free Hard Science trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
52 free hard science trivia questions with answers. Most science quizzes stop at the chemical symbol for gold. This one starts there and keeps going. Fifty hard science trivia questions cover the element found on the Sun before Earth, the densest metal, the martyrs of fluorine, the constants that now define the kilogram and the metre, the particle predicted 40 years before it was found, the planet located by mathematics, the woman who worked out what stars are made of, the physics of fission, prions, transposons, CRISPR, ribosomes and a mathematician who left 3,900 results behind. Every question is genuinely difficult but unambiguous. Nothing here needs a calculator, but most of it needs a science degree, a habit of reading Nobel citations, or a very good memory. If you want to humble a pub quiz team, a physics class or a group chat of engineers, this is the round. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia article on the element, particle, person or discovery in question, and each question shows its source under the explanation.
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Q 01Which element was seen in the Sun's spectrum in 1868, decades before being found on Earth?
Helium
Helium's bright yellow D3 line at 587.49 nm, seen in the 1868 eclipse spectrum, was at first taken for sodium; Norman Lockyer named the element after Helios, the Greek sun god, and it was isolated on Earth in 1895.
Q 02In 2007, dehydrated tardigrades survived ten days exposed to what on the FOTON-M3 mission?
The vacuum of space
On the 2007 FOTON-M3 flight (the TARDIS experiment), dried tardigrades spent ten days in the vacuum of space in low Earth orbit; most survived vacuum alone, and some survived vacuum plus solar ultraviolet, later laying viable eggs.
Q 03Which two different sciences did the same woman win Nobel Prizes in, a feat no one else has matched?
Physics and Chemistry
She shared the 1903 physics prize with Pierre and Becquerel, and took the 1911 chemistry prize alone; the family went on to collect five Nobels.
Q 04Which pioneering scientist named the first element she discovered after her homeland, Poland?
Marie Curie
Polonium honoured Poland; radium followed. Perey, a Curie student, later named francium for France.
Q 05Which is the densest stable element, about twice as dense as lead?
Osmium
Osmium is the densest stable element at about 22.59 g/cm3, edging out iridium (22.56); lead is only 11.3 g/cm3, so osmium is roughly twice as dense.
Q 06Which metal has the highest melting point of any element, at 3,422 °C?
Tungsten
Tungsten melts at 3,422 °C, the highest of any metal; carbon stays solid to higher temperatures but sublimes at atmospheric pressure rather than melting, so tungsten holds the record among elements with a true melting point.
Q 07Which element, discovered by Marguerite Perey in 1939, was the last found in nature?
Francium
Francium, found by Marguerite Perey in Paris in 1939, was the last element discovered in nature rather than made artificially; its longest-lived isotope, francium-223, has a half-life of about 22 minutes.
Q 08Which element became, in 1937, the first to be produced predominantly artificially?
Technetium
Technetium, from the Greek for 'artificial', was identified in 1937 by Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segrè in molybdenum foil irradiated in Berkeley's cyclotron; Mendeleev had predicted it as eka-manganese.
Q 09Gallium is famous among metals for being able to do what?
Melt in a person's hand
Gallium melts at 29.76 °C, below body temperature of about 37 °C, so a solid lump will melt in a person's hand; it then stays liquid all the way up to about 2,400 °C.
Q 10Bismuth-209, long thought stable, was found in 2003 to decay with a half-life of how long?
A billion times the age of the universe
Bismuth-209's alpha decay, detected at Orsay in 2003, gives a half-life of about 1.9 × 10^19 years, roughly a billion times the age of the universe; a tonne of bismuth produces only about 3 decays per second.
Q 11Several 19th-century chemists were maimed or killed trying to isolate which reactive element?
Fluorine
Henri Moissan finally isolated it in 1886 and got the 1906 chemistry Nobel two months before his death.
Q 12Since the 2019 SI redefinition, the kilogram is defined by fixing the exact value of what?
The Planck constant
The kilogram is now defined by fixing the Planck constant at exactly 6.62607015 × 10^-34 J·s, replacing the platinum-iridium cylinder kept at Sèvres near Paris; the definition took effect on 20 May 2019.
Q 13Since 1983, the metre has been defined in terms of what?
The speed of light
Q 21Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson accidentally discovered what in 1964 with a horn antenna in New Jersey?
The cosmic microwave background
The cosmic microwave background, relic radiation from the early universe now matching a 2.7 K black body, turned up as noise in the Holmdel horn antenna in 1964; they first blamed pigeon droppings, and shared the 1978 physics Nobel.
Q 22Which planet was the only one located by mathematical prediction before it was seen through a telescope?
Neptune
Neptune was found by Johann Galle on 23 September 1846 within a degree of the position Urbain Le Verrier had calculated from irregularities in Uranus's orbit, the only planet discovered from prediction rather than by chance.
Q 23Which planet rotates clockwise on its axis, opposite to its direction of orbit around the Sun?
Light's speed in vacuum is fixed at exactly 299,792,458 m/s, so the metre is the distance light covers in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
Q 14Superconductivity was discovered in 1911 by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes while cooling which element?
Mercury
Mercury's electrical resistance vanished abruptly at 4.2 K in Kamerlingh Onnes's Leiden laboratory on 8 April 1911, a discovery made possible by the cryogenic liquefier he had built three years earlier.
Q 15The complete expulsion of a magnetic field from a superconductor's interior is called what?
The Meissner effect
Meissner and Ochsenfeld found it in 1933; it is why a magnet levitates over a cooled superconductor.
Q 16Absolute zero corresponds to what temperature on the Celsius scale?
−273.15 °C
Absolute zero is −273.15 °C, exactly 0 on the Kelvin scale, which is why Kelvin and Celsius readings differ by 273.15; the third law of thermodynamics says no finite process can reach it.
Q 17Who proposed the neutrino in 1930 to save a bedrock principle that beta decay seemed to violate?
Wolfgang Pauli
Fermi supplied the name 'little neutral one'; the particle was not detected until Cowan and Reines in 1956, work rewarded with a Nobel in 1995.
Q 18Who first detected the positron, the electron's antiparticle, in 1932?
Carl Anderson
Dirac's equation had predicted it; Anderson found it in cosmic-ray tracks and named it from 'positive electron'.
Q 19The particle consistent with the Higgs boson was announced in 2012 by which two experiments?
ATLAS and CMS
ATLAS and CMS, the two general-purpose detectors at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, each announced a new boson near 125 GeV on 4 July 2012; Peter Higgs and François Englert shared the 2013 physics Nobel.
Q 20Which Nobel laureate's 1993 book gave the Higgs boson its unloved nickname, the 'God particle'?
Leon Lederman
Leon Lederman, who won the 1988 physics Nobel for the muon neutrino, wrote The God Particle with Dick Teresi in 1993; he said the publisher would not allow his preferred title, 'The Goddamn Particle'.
Venus
Venus spins clockwise as seen from above its north pole, taking 243 Earth days for one rotation, longer than its 225-day orbit; a full day-night cycle there lasts about 117 Earth days, and it has no moons.
Q 24Who proposed in 1950 the distant cloud of icy bodies now thought to be the source of long-period comets?
Jan Oort
Jan Oort proposed the cloud in 1950 from the orbits of long-period comets; the Oort cloud is thought to reach from about 2,000 to 200,000 AU, over three light-years out, and Ernst Öpik had floated a similar idea in 1932.
Q 25On 25 August 2012, Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to do what?
Enter interstellar space
Voyager 1, launched in 1977, crossed the heliopause on 25 August 2012 to enter interstellar space, the first spacecraft to do so, about 121 astronomical units from the Sun.
Q 26Who discovered Pluto in 1930 at Lowell Observatory?
Clyde Tombaugh
Clyde Tombaugh, a 24-year-old hired at Lowell Observatory the year before, spotted Pluto on 18 February 1930 by blinking photographic plates; Pluto's moon Charon is over half its diameter, so the pair are sometimes called a binary.
Q 27Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin's 1925 thesis correctly concluded that stars are made mostly of what?
Hydrogen and helium
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin's 1925 Harvard thesis showed that stars are made mostly of hydrogen and helium; Henry Norris Russell persuaded her to call the result spurious, then reached the same conclusion himself in 1929.
Q 28Which physicist worked out fission with her nephew Otto Frisch in 1938 but was left out of Otto Hahn's Nobel?
Lise Meitner
Element 109, meitnerium, is named for her; she was the first woman to be a full professor of physics in Germany.
Q 29Chicago Pile-1, the first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, went critical on what date?
2 December 1942
Chicago Pile-1 went critical on 2 December 1942 at about 3:25 pm in a squash court beneath the west stands of Stagg Field, the University of Chicago's football ground, built from graphite blocks and uranium.
Q 30Who shared the 1963 physics Nobel with Maria Goeppert Mayer for the nuclear shell model?
J. Hans D. Jensen
J. Hans D. Jensen, working in Heidelberg, arrived at the nuclear shell model with spin-orbit coupling independently of Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1949; the two shared half of the 1963 physics Nobel, the other half going to Eugene Wigner.