Isaac Newton Trivia
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57 free Isaac Newton trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Isaac Newton trivia quiz goes well beyond the falling apple. The easy questions cover the landmarks everyone half-remembers: where and when he was born, the Principia, the laws of motion, the prism and the spectrum, and the unit of force that carries his name. From there it moves into the plague years at Woolsthorpe, the priority fight over calculus, the first working reflecting telescope and the odd career turn that made a Cambridge professor the scourge of London's counterfeiters. The hard end is for people who have read a biography or two: the quart-mug baby, the burning mirror brighter than a thousand suns, the dice problem he solved for Samuel Pepys, the South Sea losses, the alchemical papers bought at auction by an economist, the diet rules, the heresy he hid for a lifetime and what a posthumous hair test turned up. Every answer was checked against Newton's encyclopaedia entry before publishing, and the source sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, our physics and famous physicists quizzes pick up where it leaves off.
30 of 57 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Royal Society couldn't fund Newton's Principia after overspending on a lavish book about what?
Fish
Fish: the Society had emptied its coffers on a lavishly illustrated history of fish that sold poorly, so Newton's masterpiece had to be paid for by a friend.
Q 02Newton shares credit for inventing calculus with which German mathematician?
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz reached calculus independently and published first, in 1684, while Newton sat on his earlier method; their priority fight soured the last decades of Newton's life.
Q 03Newton was born at a manor house in which county?
Lincolnshire
Lincolnshire: his father, a well-off man who could not sign his own name, died shortly before the boy was born.
Q 04According to the Julian calendar then used in England, Newton was born on which holiday in 1642?
Christmas Day
Christmas Day 1642 on England's old calendar was already 4 January 1643 on the modern Gregorian one, which is why his birth year appears both ways.
Q 05Newton was so small at birth that his mother said he could have fit inside what?
A quart mug
A quart mug, by his mother's account, would have held him; he was so frail that nobody expected him to last the day, yet he lived into his eighties.
Q 06Newton's twice-widowed mother pulled him out of school in his teens to train him for which occupation?
Farmer
Farmer was her plan, since he was to manage the family estate, but he neglected the work for his books until his uncle and his headmaster persuaded her to send him back to school.
Q 07As a schoolboy, Newton built a working model windmill and made which animal turn it as his 'miller'?
A mouse
A mouse ran the mill from inside, and the boy joked that his 'mouse miller' was a thief who ate all the corn put in to be ground.
Q 08Which Cambridge college admitted Newton in June 1661?
Trinity
Trinity was his uncle's old college; he arrived older than most of his classmates because his schooling had been interrupted, and stayed for more than thirty years.
Q 09Newton entered Cambridge as a 'subsizar', which meant he paid his way by doing what?
Performing valet duties
Performing valet duties for others earned his keep even though his mother was well off; a scholarship in 1664 ended the chores.
Q 10Why did Cambridge University close in 1665, sending Newton home for his 'golden years' of discovery?
The Great Plague
The Great Plague kept him at home for most of two years, where he laid the foundations of calculus, his theory of colours and his law of gravitation.
Q 11Which physicist held Newton's old Lucasian chair at Cambridge from 1979 to 2009?
Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking held the chair for thirty years; Newton kept the title for years after he had left Cambridge to work at the Mint in London.
Q 12Whom did Newton succeed as Lucasian Professor in 1669?
Isaac Barrow
Isaac Barrow gave up the chair to devote himself to divinity and recommended Newton in his place, having already sent the young man's work to London as that of a genius.
Q 13What did Newton do, his assistant recalled, when no students came to hear him speak?
Gave a shortened lecture to the walls
Q 21The coloured pattern seen where a curved lens rests on flat glass is known as Newton's what?
Rings
Rings: studying them in Opticks, Newton found he could explain the pattern only by adding wave-like behaviour to his own theory of light.
Q 22Newton's first law of motion, that a body keeps its state unless something acts on it, is the law of what?
Inertia
Inertia is the name; the idea that a moving body needs no push to keep going came from Galileo, and Newton made it the first law of his system.
Q 23Which astronomer encouraged and paid for the publication of the Principia?
Edmond Halley
Edmond Halley coaxed the book out of Newton and then paid for the printing himself, because the Royal Society's funds were exhausted.
Gave a shortened lecture to the walls: so few came, and fewer understood, that he often read to an empty room, left early and went back to his experiments.
Q 14Newton built the first working reflecting telescope to sidestep which flaw of lens telescopes?
Chromatic aberration
Chromatic aberration, the coloured fringing a lens adds, seemed incurable to him, so he used a mirror instead; he was wrong, as John Dollond's colour-corrected lenses later proved.
Q 15Newton named seven colours in the rainbow; which one did he place between blue and violet?
Indigo
Indigo made seven: Newton first listed fewer colours, then stretched the count to match the seven notes of the musical scale.
Q 16Newton reported that his new reflecting telescope showed him the crescent phase of which planet?
Venus
Venus appeared with a 'Moon-like phase', he wrote, and the little instrument that showed it won him election to the Royal Society in 1672.
Q 17Newton ground the mirrors for his telescopes from a custom composition of what?
Speculum metal
Speculum metal, a hard, brittle alloy of copper and tin, was used because it takes a bright polish; silvered glass, which later replaced it, had not yet been invented.
Q 18What name did Newton give to the multicoloured band of light that emerges from a prism?
Spectrum
Spectrum is Latin for 'appearance'; Newton borrowed the word for the band and showed that a lens and a second prism could merge its colours back into white light.
Q 19Newton's Opticks of 1704 first appeared in which language?
English
English came first, a break from the scholarly Latin of his Principia; a Latin translation did not follow until 1706.
Q 20In Opticks, Newton argued that light is fundamentally composed of what?
Particles
Particles, or 'corpuscles', were his answer, and that view reigned until the wave theory was revived in the nineteenth century.
Q 24Which term did Newton coin for the inward pull that keeps a planet in its orbit?
Centripetal force
Centripetal force first appears in a nine-page tract of 1684, written to answer a visitor's question about orbits, that grew within three years into the Principia.
Q 25What is the literal meaning of 'gravitas', the Latin word Newton used for the effect we call gravity?
Weight
Weight, or heaviness, is the literal sense; by using one everyday word for falling stones and the orbiting Moon, Newton claimed that a single pull governs both.
Q 26Newton's 'hypotheses non fingo' answered critics who dismissed his gravity as what kind of quality?
Occult
Occult was the charge, because his gravity acted across empty space with no visible mechanism; Newton answered that he would describe it without guessing at its cause.
Q 27How long did Newton famously take to solve Johann Bernoulli's 1696 brachistochrone problem?
One night
One night was enough: he came home tired from the Mint at four, solved it by four in the morning and sent it off unsigned, yet Bernoulli knew 'the lion by his claw'.
Q 28In 1693 the diarist Samuel Pepys asked Newton for advice on a probability problem involving what?
Throwing dice
Throwing dice: Pepys asked which of three wagers was likeliest, and Newton showed that the simplest, at least one six from six dice, beat the bigger throws Pepys had favoured.
Q 29As a young man, Newton extended which theorem to fractional and negative powers?
Binomial
Binomial expansions had been limited to whole-number powers; Newton's version turned roots and fractions into infinite series, which became a mainstay of his mathematics.
Q 30What name did Newton give to his own version of calculus?
The method of fluxions
The method of fluxions was finished in 1671, but Newton failed to get it printed and it reached the public only in 1736, nine years after his death.