Quantum Theory...What A Ride! Online Trivia | Quantum and Orbital Mechanics

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. First of all, this great physicist in 1905, started the modern day discussions, about the dual nature of electrons. He also invented the constant named after him, which has achieved tremendous success. What's his name?

Answer: Max Planck

After an hitherto unknown bloke named Albert Einstein published his papers on relativity, Planck was one of the first to recognize the significance of those papers. You must understand, that during those times, quantum theory was at its infancy and it required some real brave assumption power coupled with intellect to make those breakthroughs.

His basic theory, that matter and charge were composed of small packets called "quanta", revolutionized the study of these particles, and cemented the quantum theory in the very base of modern physics.

2. After Planck, another great German scientist did an awkward thing - he published his special theory before his general theory on a particular topic. Simple - who is he?

Answer: Albert Einstein

Yes, weird as it may sound, he published his special theory of relativity in 1905, and then the general theory in 1911. It may have seemed a bit satirical at that point, but that was the man - the greatest undoubtedly. Basically, the papers on special relativity focused mainly on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion and electromagnetic waves.

After its phenomenal success mainly based on the legendary equation E=mc^2, he published general relativity based on macroscopic phenomena such as gravitation.

3. In which conference, the fifth and most famous edition of which was held in 1927, were some of the greatest names in quantum physics present, but sadly there was no concrete outcome of it! (It was named after a famous chemist.)

Answer: The Solvay Conference

The Solvay Conference consisted of some of the biggest names in quantum physics back then - Planck, Curie, Einstein, Bohr, Dirac, Heisenberg, Pauli, Debye - you name them. It was presided over by Heindrik Lorentz, a leading proponent of the electromagnetic theory.

The battle between the young group led by Pauli and Dirac and the veterans led by Planck and Bohr was a mouth-watering contest, with both sides coming up with well-founded theories. But there was really no concrete outcome of this - the problems remained bigger, the solutions far away.

4. There cannot be a quantum physics quiz without Schrodinger. Which animal did he specifically use for his famous thought experiment regarding uncertainty?

Answer: Cat

Obviously, he wanted a cat for his famous gamma-ray box hiding trick. We really do not know of any specific reason why! The outcome of this thought experiment is history - he put a strong theory about uncertainty, something even Heisenberg had not formulated.

This was in response to the Copenhagen interpretation of the erstwhile quantum physics. He proclaimed that the cat, depending upon some random phenomenon, may be both alive and dead! Although it was only a thought experiment, it paved the way for bolder assumptions and bigger strides in quantum mechanics.

5. This young British physicist was one of the "brat pack", along with another Austrian prodigy, who changed the world of quantum physics, turning it on its head. Name both of them.

Answer: Dirac and Pauli

Paul Dirac, along with Wolfgang Pauli, placed quantum mechanics on a firm mathematical footing, disregarding the "old guard"'s idea of free orbits. They really wanted the aesthetic beauty of the equations rather than what they implied. With his famous equation, Dirac properly introduced fermions and their behaviour under various fields.

6. Now we come to the Danish king of physics - Niels Bohr. What did Bohr imply, in his orbit theory about electrons falling into the nucleus, that was not accepted by the mass audience of physicists at that time?

Answer: Failure of conservation of energy

This is a common mistake. Wave-particle duality was not established by Bohr until later in the 1930s, whereas he had already established some facts upon Rutherford's calculations. While Rutherford's interpretations were contradicted by the electromagnetic theory of Maxwell, Bohr corrected it, but his own theory ran into criticism. Orbits do not neccessarily conserve energy!. If an electron does "jump" into another orbit, how can you be sure that energy is conserved?

7. This French physicist is widely regarded as one of the greatest ever. He first promoted the wave particle duality through a simple equation. This formed the basis for other scientists to work on. Who was he?

Answer: De Broglie

Louis de Broglie's equation was even understandable to a freshman - V=h/p, where V was the wavelength, p the momentum, and h Planck's constant. He thus stated that electrons have both mass and wavelength, however minuscule.

Even humans, both as a whole as well as their minute body parts, have wave functions, but they are too small to observe. But an electron, having a very small mass, has a considerable wavelength.

8. Right, now to the 1940s and onward. This particular topic was studied by Bohr, Einstein, Dirac, de Broglie, Feynman, and even Hawking, but even seventy years later, in 2010, no one on earth had come up with a proper explanation of this strange phenomenon. No one could have imagined that this happens in the quantum world too. What topic?

Answer: Quantum Electrodynamics

Quantum Electrodynamics(QED) is something no one grasps, even now in the early 2010s. Actually, Richard Feynman put forward the only known resolution to this baffling thing -the simple logic that electrons, protons, photons, etc. move properly under influence of various fields, but nothing is known about the way in which they go there. Even more strange is the fact that electrodynamics, of all physical phenomena, happens there too!. Is it not bad enough here in the macroscopic world?

9. This particular laboratory houses the biggest particle accelerator on earth. This is the place to be if you are involved in developing particle physics. Situated in between two countries, simple: name it.

Answer: CERN

The European Council for Nuclear Research, situated between Switzerland and France. It is one of the premier institutes of particle physics. Thousands of scientists flock here to study and learn about these things. It houses the largest particle accelerator on Earth, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

10. Lastly, this one's a tough nut to crack. Which of the following subatomic quantities is named after a scientist?

Answer: Boson

It is the boson, named after Satyendranath Bose, who along with Einstein, discovered the 'Bose-Einstein Condensate', a totally new state of matter, based on the Bose-Einstein statistics, which could not be explained by other interpretations. S.N.Bose also made numerous contributions to modern physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, etc. and remains one of the greatest scientists the world, let alone India, has ever produced.

Source: Author shaunak_rokz

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor WesleyCrusher before going online.
Any errors found in FunTrivia content are routinely corrected through our feedback system.

Quantum Theory...What A Ride! Trivia Quiz

Over the years, quantum theory has had hundreds of interpretations from leading physicists all over the world. Let's see how you match up on one of the most gruelling (and interesting) topics still affecting us!

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