PMA Trivia
The thing on the first floor of the PMA.
What is the petawatt laser?
What Steven Weinberg won the Nobel prize for.
What is the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles?
James Clerk Maxwell used to throw cats out of windows WITHOUT HARMING THEM. This is the physics principle was he trying to demonstrate doing this.
What is conservation of angular momentum?
In the movie “Don’t Look Up”, this is why people are not looking up.
What is a world-destroying meteor?
What is the magnitude of the charge needed to levitate a person? Assuming the electric field at Earth's surface is 100 N/C and the person weighs 60 kg?
What is 5.88 C?
The year the PMA was built.
What is 1972?
The mathematician that showed that with every symmetry is associated some conservation law.
Who is Emmy Noether?
In Silverberg et al. 2013, “Collective Motion of Moshers at Heavy Metal Concerts”, they studied moshers moving randomly, colliding with one another in an undirected fashion. This is the physics concept that the moshers resemble.
What is kinetics of gaseous particles?
The concept from general relativity causes Matthew McConnaughey in Interstellar to return to Earth younger than his daughter.
What is time dilation?
How long would it take you to fall from the top of the PMA to the plaza in front of speedway? Neglect air resistance and assume you are spherical and 100 kg. An average story in a building is 3m.
What is 1.56s?
The name of the bat that was found in the PMA and rehabilitated to return to the wild.
This physicist served as the Warden and Master of the Royal Mint after their physics career?
Who is Sir Isaac Newton?
Andre Geim is the only person to win both the Nobel and Ig Nobel prize. This is why he was awarded either prize (+100 points if you know why he won both).
What is he levitated a frog in a large magnet and/or he discovered graphene?
This brand made a Good Will Hunting themed Super bowl ad.
What is Dunkin Donuts?
CPS Investigation
What is ~18m/s?
The rumor that explains the reason that there are bathrooms in the stairwells of the PMA.
What is people wanted more lab space on the floors so they shoved the bathrooms to the stairwells?
This person discovered the solution for arithmetic sequences at only 8 years old.
Who is Carl Friedrich Gauss?
John Clauser is a Nobel laureate who gave a colloquium here in 2023. This is why he is conterversial.
What is he is a climate change denier?
The NASA mission that the movie Hidden Figures is focused on.
What is Project Mercury OR Friendship 7?
Frustrated with it all...
The floors that the showers are in between.
What is Floors 10 and 11?
This person ran a famous experiment under a football stadium.
Who is Enrico Fermi?
This person wrote the paper arguing that advanced civilizations must have a superstructure that produces infinite energy for them.
Who is Freeman Dyson?
In "The Man Who Knew Infinity" this is the disease Ramanujan was diagnosed with.
What is tuberculosis?
If two protons lose 1.07x10^-29 kg from their total mass when undergoing nuclear fusion and the sun fuses 3.7x10^38 protons every second, how many doritos chips worth of energy does the sun consume in a day (10 kcal/chip) and (4184 J/ kcal)?
What is 3.68x10^26 chips?