Fermi Questions
How many oxygen atoms are in the carbonation in a can of Coca-Cola?
23
This is Pac-Man's original name in Japan.
What is Puckman?
These types of particles have half-integer spin, such as electrons and quarks.
In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, this city serves as the former home of a main character, but has canonically been accidentally destroyed by an areal bombardment of trash.
What is Troy, New New York?
The First Law of Thermodynamics
\Delta U = Q-W
This 2008 film, a Best Picture Oscar winner, intersperses scenes of a contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? with flashbacks of his childhod.
What is Slumdog Millionaire?
9
"Korobeiniki", a folk song about a peddler and a girl haggling over the price of goods, is best known as the theme for this video game.
This type of particle, also facetiously called the "God Particle", accounts for the mass of elementary particles.
What is the Higgs Boson?
This ancient Homeric work depicts the late days of the Trojan War.
What is The Iliad?
The Biot-Savart Law
B(\vec{r}) = \frac{\mu_0}{4\pi} \int_C \frac{I d\vec{l} \times \hat{r}'}{|\vec{r}'|^2}
This man, now famous for his podcast, was once the host of Fear Factor?
Who is Joe Rogan?
How many rotisserie chickens did Costco sell in 2021?
8
Player reactions to a simulated disease in this computer game so closely resembled historical records about plagues that epidemiologists still use it to study potential future outbreaks.
What is World of Warcraft?
These particles were once thought to be massless, but their oscillations imply a small but nonzero mass.
What are neutrinos?
The Einstein Field Equations
R_{\mu\nu} - \frac{1}{2} R g_{\mu\nu}=\kappa T_{\mu\nu}
On what reality/game show did Johnny "Fairplay" Dalton lie about his grandmother dying in order to garner sympathy and convince the other players to forfeit, allowing him to win.
What is Survivor?
7
Nintendo, best known for their incredibly popular Mario and Zelda franchises as well as their numerous consoles, was founded in this decade.
While gluons mediate the strong interaction within hadrons, these particles, hadrons themselves, mediate the residual strong interaction between nucleons.
What are pions?
The protagonist of this great literary work is guided along his journey by a fictional version of the poet Virgil, most famous for his own epic poem about Aeneas and his journey after the destruction of his homeland of Troy.
Virgil
The Berkenstein-Hawking entropy formula.
S = \frac{A}{4G}
The Monty Hall Problem, famous in statistics classrooms, gets it name from the host of this classic game show.
What is Press Your Luck?
What is the mass of everything in the asteroid belt in kilograms?
21
This game series, which has an infamously complicated plot, contains a plot twist in which the government has been producing video games with overly complicated plots--including the game you're playing, which is revealed to be a video game in-universe--in order to keep the populace distracted from societal inequity and government corruption.
What is Metal Gear Solid?
This is the symmetry group of the Standard Model.
What is
SU(3) \times SU(2) \times U(1)
This is the city motto of Troy, New York.
What is Ilium Fuit, Troia Est.
The Friedmann Equation
H^2 \equiv (\frac{\dot{R}}{R})^2 =\frac{8\pi G \rho}{3} - \frac{k}{R^2} + \frac{\Lambda}{3}
In 1999, John Carpenter became the first top-prize winner on Who Wants to be a Millionaire. He famously used his only lifeline to call his father--not for advice but to tell him that he was going to win the million dollars--before answering correctly that this U.S. President appeared on the television series Laugh-In.
Who is Richard Nixon?