Pop Culture
This American theoretical physicist was the director of the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II and is often referred to as the “father of the atomic bomb.”
Who is J. Robert Oppenheimer?
The MC Physics club is a chapter of this national physics society ‘SPS’.
What is the Society of Physics Students?
This MC alum went on to run a silicon chip company. His family holds the record for the largest donation in MC college history and is the namesake of this science center.
Who is Dave Rickey?
Better known for his theory of relativity, this scientist was awarded a Nobel prize for "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect."
Who is Albert Einstein?
The length traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
What is a meter?
This popular TV sitcom named after a theory describing the expansion of the universe featured characters including theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper.
What is The Big Bang Theory?
The P in PET scans, this anti-particle is used to study the sources of medical seizures in the body.
What is positron? (Positron Emission Tomography)
This MC college alum returned to MC as a physics professor for 41 years. He is one-half of the namesake of our planetarium.
Who is Professor Lester Anderson?
This scientist was the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields. She was awarded the Nobel prize in physics in 1903 for contributions to radiation, and the 1911 prize in chemistry for discovery of the elements radium and polonium.
Who is Marie Curie?
This unit of measurement equal to 149.6 million kilometers is the mean distance from the center of the earth to the center of the sun.
What is an Astronomical Unit (AU)?
In this blockbuster film by Christopher Nolan, a group of astronauts travel through a wormhole near Saturn in search of a new home for humankind. The black hole shown in this film was modeled by physicists including Nobel prize winner Kip Thorne.
What is Interstellar?
The S in LASER, this word describes a process that contrasts with "spontaneous" emission of light, producing monochromatic rays.
What is stimulated? (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation)
This MC alum was an American physician, microbiologist, and immunologist. He was also the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Who is Dr. Richard M. Krause?
This scientist, famous for his uncertainty principle, was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the creation of quantum mechanics.” The MC physics department has a signed copy of one of his books.
Who is Werner Heisenberg?
This unit of length is approximately equal to 3.26 light-years. Han Solo (Star Wars) claimed his ship made the Kessel Run in less than 12 of this unit.
What is a parsec?
This lead guitarist of a popular British band wrote the song “We Will Rock You.” He also earned his PhD is astrophysics in 2007 and was a collaborator with NASA’s New Horizon’s Pluto mission. (Name the band or artist.)
What is Queen?/Who is Brian May?
The National Science Foundation supports many paid summer internships for undergraduate physics students across the country called ‘REUs.’ MC students have been very successful in acceptance for these.
What are Research Experiences for Undergraduates?
This MC alum and current college employee shares a birthday with Einstein.
Who is Franci Bolden?
The 2010 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for their work with this two-dimensional (single layer) material which is a hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms. It can be created using pencil ‘lead’ and Scotch tape!
What is Graphene?
This unit of energy is the amount of kinetic energy gained by a single electron accelerating from rest through an electric potential difference of one volt in vacuum.
What is an electron volt (eV)?
This science fiction novel (soon to appear on Netflix) written by Liu Cixin explores a world with multiple ‘suns’ orbiting each other in an unstable system. It is named after a problem in orbital mechanics where no closed-form solution exists.
What is the Three-Body Problem?
The H in LHC, the world’s largest particle accelerator near Geneva Switzerland.
What is Hadron (Large Hadron Collider)?
This American physician and NASA astronaut received is B.A. in Chemistry from MC. He is the only astronaut to have flown on all five space shuttles.
Who is Story Musgrave?
(Any) One of the three scientists the Nobel prize in physics was awarded to this year for "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter."
Who is Pierre Agostini/Anne L'Huillier/Ferenc Krausz?
This fundamental physics constant is often used in quantum mechanics. A photon’s energy is equal to its frequency multiplied by this constant.
What is Planck’s constant, ‘h’?