Famous Physicists
This physicist’s hair is almost as famous as his theory of relativity.
Who is Albert Einstein?
You hold one tennis ball at shoulder height. You drop it straight down. At the exact same time, you throw a second identical ball horizontally (no spin) from the same height.Which ball hits the ground first?
The balls hit the ground at the same time!
This fruity unit measures radiation exposure based on the radioactivity of a common snack.
What is the Banana Equivalent Dose?
Tony Stark’s suit is powered by this fictional miniature reactor inside his chest.
What is the arc reactor?
Sir Isaac Newton developed this branch of mathematics, which studies how things change and is fundamental to AP Physics C.
What is calculus?
She discovered radioactivity and won two Nobel Prizes—one in physics, one in chemistry.
Who is Marie Curie?
You lift a suitcase from the floor to a table.
Is work done by the gravitational force positive, negative, or zero?
This fictional speed unit equals one trillion times the speed of light, often used in sci-fi.
What is a “parsec”? (Bonus: it’s actually a distance, not speed!)
In this 2013 movie, Sandra Bullock’s character struggles to survive after a space accident.
What is Gravity?
An electron moves through a magnetic field directed into the page. If the electron’s velocity is to the right, what is the direction of the magnetic force acting on it?
What is up?
This modern astrophysicist is known for making science accessible, hosting Cosmos, and tweeting about space.
Who is Neil deGrasse Tyson?
In this type of collision, two objects stick together after impact and kinetic energy is not conserved.
What is an inelastic collision?
This unit was originally based on the approximate power a strong 'pulling animal' could sustain over time and is still used to rate engines.
What is horsepower?
In Interstellar, time passes differently near a massive black hole due to this effect predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity.
What is time dilation?
If you have a position function x(t) describing an object’s location over time, this mathematical operation gives you the object’s velocity function v(t).
What is taking the derivative?
He led the Manhattan Project and famously quoted, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Who is J. Robert Oppenheimer?
What happens to the velocity of a satellite in a stable circular orbit as its orbital radius increases?
What is the velocity decreases?
This unit is unimaginably tiny, considered the smallest meaningful length in physics.
What is the Planck length?
In the movie 'Back to the Future', the DeLorean must reach this exact speed to activate the flux capacitor and travel through time.
What is 88 miles per hour?
You know an object’s initial velocity, acceleration, and the time it’s been moving. Which kinematic equation could you use to find its final position?
What is y = y0+v0t +1/2 a t2
This 19th-century Scottish physicist created a set of equations that unified electricity and magnetism into one elegant theory.
Who is James Clerk Maxwell?
A ball is thrown from ground level at an angle of 30° above the horizontal with an initial speed of 25 m/s.
What is the time of flight? (Assume g = 10m/s/s)
2.5 s
This unit measures time and varies depending on context, but in physics it’s often used as the time it takes light to travel one fermi.
What is a jiffy?
This thought experiment, referenced in various shows and movies, involves a common household pet that is both alive and dead until observed.
What is Schrödinger’s cat?
This set of four fundamental equations unifies electricity and magnetism into a single elegant theory, laying the foundation for classical electromagnetism.
What are Maxwell’s Equations?