Famous Physicists
Units and measurement
Energy
Everyday Physics
Physics or fiction?
100
Which physicist discovered the following relation between mass and energy: E=mc2
Albert Einstein
100
What device measures temperature?
Thermometer
100
You raise a bowling ball into the air. Before releasing it, it has _____ energy. After you release it and it's falling, it gains ______ energy.
potential , kinetic
100
Why does ice float in water?
Ice is less dense than water.
100
This perpetual motion machine can keep the ball cycling around forever by using magnets in the base to accelerate the ball, with no power source.
Fiction!
Perpetual motion is not possible because energy in the system is always lost as heat over time. This device has battery-powered electromagnets to accelerate the ball, and the ball would soon stop without the batteries continuously supplying more energy
200
Which physicist is rumored to have been inspired by an apple falling from a tree to invent his theory of gravity?
Isaac Newton
200
How many grams are in a kilogram?
1000g = 1kg
200
Which physical principle states that energy is never created or destroyed, but only changes form?
Conservation of Energy
200
This is why your hair stands up when you rub a balloon on it.
Static electricity.
200
Is this magnet dropping slowly through a copper tube physics or magic?
Physics
This is due to Lenz' Law (electric induction by magnetic field)
300
This woman was the first person to win a Nobel Prize in two different fields (physics and chemistry)
Marie Curie
300
How many microseconds are in 1 second?
1,000,000ms = 106ms = 1s
300
The energy that powers virtually all life on Earth comes from what source?
The Sun. The only known exception is micro-organisms that use the heat energy from thermal vents deep in the ocean.
300
Which of the following is true about white light?
a) it has the longest wavelength of any color of visible light
b) it has the highest frequency of any color of visible light
c) it is a combination of all the other colors of light
d) it is UV light
c) it is a combination of all the other colors of light.
This is why a prism can separate a beam of light into all the colors of the rainbow
300
Electrons are fired one at a time through a wall with two slits. The pattern formed on the screen behind is different if we put a detector by the wall that detects which slit each electron passed through.
Physics! This shows the wave-particle duality of electrons and the collapse of the wavefunction upon observation.
400
This Italian physicist dropped objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to study gravity and improved the telescope.
Galileo Galilei
400
What is the SI unit for electrical current?
Amps (A)
400
What type of momentum do we use to describe a mass rotating around a point?
Angular momentum
400
When you hit the brakes in your car, the kinetic energy of your car gets converted into ____ energy.
Thermal
400
Einstein's relativity tells us that time passes more slowly for objects moving very quickly. This means that it is theoretically possible to go so fast in a spaceship that you begin to travel backwards in time.
Fiction!
The first sentence is true. However, Einstein's equations tell us that one would have to go faster than the speed of light to go backwards in time, and this is not possible.
500
This Austrian physicist was a key figure in the development of quantum mechanics and created a famous thought experiment involving a cat in order to describe quantum superpositions.
Erwin Schrodinger
500
What is the SI unit for resistance?
Ohms ( \Omega )
500
Nuclear fission from 1kg of Uranium-235 would release about as much energy as burning how many gallons of gasoline?
a) 150 gallons
b) 12,000 gallons
c) 600,000 gallons
d) 1 billion gallons
c) 600,000 gallons (8.2 x 1013 Joules of energy)
500
What optical phenomenon makes a straw look bent when it's in a glass of water.
Refraction - light bends when it changes the medium through which it is travelling.
500
Two high-energy photons (particles of light with no mass and no electric charge) collide and produce an electron and a positron (which have both mass and electric charge).
This is actually possible! Its an example of Einstein's famous E=mc2. The energy of the photons is converted into mass, and conservation of charge is not violated because the net charge of electron+positron is zero.