Classical Physics
This law states that force equals mass times acceleration.
What is Newton’s Second Law?
This is the name of the galaxy that Earth is in.
What is the Milky Way?
This German physicist is famous for his thought experiment involving a cat that is both alive and dead.
Who is Erwin Schrödinger?
He developed the theory of general relativity.
Who is Albert Einstein?
In Avengers: Endgame, the heroes rely on this kind of physics concept to travel through time.
What is the quantum realm (quantum physics)?
This conserved quantity is the product of an object’s mass and velocity.
What is linear momentum?
This stellar remnant is left behind after a supernova if the mass is below about 3 solar masses.
What is a neutron star?
This principle states that you cannot simultaneously know both the position and momentum of a particle with arbitrary precision.
What is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?
She discovered radioactivity along with her husband Pierre and won two Nobel Prizes.
Who is Marie Curie?
In Spider-Man, Peter Parker’s webs need to support his weight while swinging. The stress on the webbing can be analyzed using this branch of physics.
What is mechanics (or material physics/strength of materials)?
This law of rotational motion states that the net torque on a system equals the time rate of change of this quantity.
What is angular momentum?
This effect causes light from distant galaxies to shift toward the red end of the spectrum.
What is redshift?
This mathematical object fully describes the state of a quantum system, and its evolution is governed by the Schrödinger equation.
What is the wavefunction (or state vector)?
This German physicist introduced the concept of quantized energy levels in 1900 to explain blackbody radiation.
Who is Max Planck?
In Interstellar, the spacecraft Endurance orbits this kind of astronomical object, causing extreme time dilation.
What is a black hole?
In fluid dynamics, this principle states that an increase in the speed of a fluid occurs simultaneously with a decrease in pressure.
What is Bernoulli’s Principle?
This paradox asks why the night sky is dark if the universe is infinite and filled with stars.
What is Olbers’ Paradox?
This algorithm provides a quadratic speedup for searching unsorted databases compared to classical methods.
What is Grover’s Algorithm?
This French physicist proposed that particles like electrons could exhibit wave-like behavior, an idea confirmed by diffraction experiments.
Who is Louis de Broglie?
In Avengers: Endgame, the heroes travel through the Quantum Realm to change past events. The idea of multiple timelines in the movie loosely relates to this real-world quantum mechanics interpretation.
What is the Many-Worlds Interpretation?
In classical mechanics, the quantity defined as the integral of the Lagrangian over time is minimized or made stationary according to this principle.
What is the Principle of Least Action (Hamilton’s Principle)?
This paradox arises because the most massive known black holes at high redshifts appear to have grown faster than allowed by Eddington-limited accretion.
What is the supermassive black hole growth problem (or the quasar formation paradox)?
In quantum error correction, this type of code encodes one logical qubit into multiple physical qubits to protect against bit-flip and phase-flip errors.
What is the Shor code (or a quantum error-correcting code)?
This British physicist developed the mathematical framework of quantum electrodynamics, predicted antimatter, and formulated an equation uniting quantum mechanics with special relativity.
Who is Paul Dirac?
In Tenet, objects and people are “inverted,” moving backward in time. From a physics perspective, this concept would require reversing this fundamental quantity for all particles.
What is entropy (or the arrow of time)?