A Matter of Scale...
The height of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai in meters
8.28x102m or 828 meters
This Polish-born French physicist/chemist is the mother of all research on radioactivity. Being the only individual to be awarded Nobel prizes in multiple fields of science, their name is synonymous with not only pioneering physics research, but tragic death at the hands of their work.
Marie Curie
This country has the largest number Nobel Laureates in physics
The United States of America
One of their three fundamental laws of motion, this law states that every force has a reactionary, opposing force of equivalent magnitude to the original force.
Newton's Third Law
A device used to store an electric charge, consisting of one or more pairs of conductors separated by an insulator.
Capacitor
Radius of the Milky Way in lightyears
1.057x105ly or 105,700 lightyears
This English chemist studied X-ray crystallography, which they used to produce the first X-ray diffraction images of DNA and experimentally confirm the double helix structure of DNA. They died 4 years before credit would then be given to two other researchers.
Rosalind Franklin
This city was the home to the first artificial self-sustaining fission reaction in 1942, overseen by Enrico Fermi.
Chicago, Illinois
This law quantifies and describes the force of attraction or repulsion for two charged particles given the distance between them.
Coulomb's Law
The separation of charges within a molecule or object, giving a namesake “moment” that interacts with electromagnetic fields
Dipole
Temperature of the core of the Sun in degrees Celsius
1.5x107 degrees Celsius
This American physicist and mathematician was instrumental in calculations of trajectories and orbital mechanics necessary for NASA’s first crewed spaceflights. Their calculations were used for the Apollo lunar lander, and they were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.
Katherine Johnson
This location existed as part of the Islamic Golden Age, this ancient library was an intellectual center of Baghdad and housed thousands of translated texts from Greek and Syriac. Many texts survived long enough to be passed on due to this archive before it was destroyed in 1258.
The Baghdad House of Wisdom
This fundamental law of electromagnetism describes how the change in the flux of a magnetic field can induce an electromotive force in the system through electromagnetic induction.
Faraday's Law
In wave-particle duality, this term refers to light when we consider it as a collection of particles. They do not have mass (in the classical sense), but they have a de Broglie wavelength all the same.
Photon
Diameter of the Hydrogen Atom in meters
2.5x10-11m, or 250 picometers
This German-born American physicist proposed the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. They also explained why certain numbers of nucleons in a nucleus result in stable atomic configurations.
Maria Goeppert-Mayer
These locations share not only a name, but a purpose! In 2016, these observatories gave us the first real observations of gravitational waves in our universe.
Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)
This thought experiment is supposed to describe a paradoxical situation in which the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics fails. Instead, this “Spooky Action at a Distance” seems to be a consequence of quantum entanglement.
Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox
This is the point at which a function takes an infinite value, such as in space–time when matter is considered “infinitely dense” for some models of a black hole.
Singularity
Average voltage of lightning in volts
3.0x108V, or 300,000,000 volts
This Astrophysicist is credited with discovering the first radio pulsars while a graduate student in the year 1967. Although they were the first to observe and precisely analyze these pulsars, the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery was not extended to this individual.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
The world's largest telescope: Known as FAST
Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope
This method of numerical integration is an improvement on the trapezoidal rule. Instead of taking trapezoidal segments to estimate the integral, this rule describes how to use quadratic interpolation of the parent function to approximate the value of the integral with higher efficiency and accuracy.
Simpson's Rule
In the study of condensed matter physics, this term refers to quantized vibrations within a system; it is the unit describing the collective excitation in a periodic, elastic arrangement of atoms or molecules.
Phonon