Aero & Astronautics
This “Thin Red Line” isn’t a rallying cry—it’s the last bit of air separating an aircraft from space.
What is the Kármán line?
This SI unit is equivalent to one Newton per square meter.
What is a Pascal?
This is the electrical resistance of a short between the plus and minus of a power supply.
What is approximately zero ohms?
This common data structure operates on a Last-In, First-Out (LIFO) principle, like plates.
What is a Stack?
Often called the "Wizard of Menlo Park," who is credited with over a thousand patents, including the practical incandescent light bulb?
Who is Thomas Edison?
This is the specific angle of attack at which an airplane wing suddenly loses most of its lift, causing the aircraft to "drop".
What is the Stall Angle / Critical AoA?
This is the rotational equivalent of force.
What is Torque?
This theorem lets you model a complex circuit as a single voltage source and series resistance—commonly used in electronics.
What is Thevenin's theorem?
The very first programmable “computer” dates back to 2 BCE—this Greek mechanical device predicted astronomical positions.
What is the Antikythera mechanism?
Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot made headlines by performing this surprising gymnastics move.
What is a backflip?
This is the term for the path an object follows around another object due to gravity, often described by Kepler's laws for celestial bodies or satellites.
What is an Orbit?
In fluid mechanics, this principle states that an increase in the speed of a fluid occurs simultaneously with a decrease in static pressure or a decrease in the fluid's potential energy.
What is Bernoulli's Principle?
This widely used communication protocol, operating in the 2.4 GHz band, is known for short-range wireless data exchange between devices, like your headphones and phone.
What is Bluetooth?
This satirical “sorting” algorithm from Usenet, which swaps out-of-order items step by step, is basically just insertion sort under a whimsical name.
What is gnome sort?
This pioneering computer scientist developed the first compiler for a programming language and is famously credited with popularizing the term "debugging" after finding a moth in a relay.
Who is Grace Hopper?
Introduced by Lockheed designer Kelly Johnson, this secretive team structures advanced spy‑plane creation.
What is Skunk Works?
This phenomenon, often observed in high-speed rotating machinery, involves a shaft's natural vibration frequency coinciding with the rotational speed, leading to potentially destructive oscillations.
What is Resonance?
You're designing a high-speed circuit. This insidious phenomenon, where unintended electromagnetic fields are generated, could mess with nearby circuits and cause your device to malfunction.
What is Electromagnetic Interference (EMI)?
The first commercial microprocessor in 1971 was the Intel 4004. This is how many bits it processed at once.
What is 4 bits?
This Ancient Greek engineer built the first steam engine (aeolipile) in the 1st century AD.
Who is Hero (Heron) of Alexandria?
This dramatic phenomenon creates a sudden, sharp change in pressure and temperature that trails behind it.
What is a Shock Wave?
When designing against material failure, this is the ratio of the maximum stress a component can withstand to the actual stress it is expected to experience during operation.
What is the Factor of Safety?
During WWII, this device decoded German messages using vacuum‑tube electronics.
What is Colossus?
This is the worst-case time complexity, in Big O notation, for sorting an array using a comparison-based algorithm like Merge Sort or Heap Sort.
What is O(n log n)?
This plane famously flew faster after losing half a wing and still landed safely.
What is the F‑15?