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Quiz about Eloquent Experiments
Quiz about Eloquent Experiments

Eloquent Experiments Trivia Quiz


Sometimes, scientific progress comes in stages, each experiment building on the last. Sometimes, though, the results of a single experiment say enough to change the way we look at the world. Test your knowledge of ten eloquent experiments.

A multiple-choice quiz by CellarDoor. Estimated time: 5 mins.
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Author
CellarDoor
Time
5 mins
Type
Multiple Choice
Quiz #
372,597
Updated
Dec 03 21
# Qns
10
Difficulty
Average
Avg Score
8 / 10
Plays
702
Awards
Top 5% quiz!
Last 3 plays: Guest 93 (6/10), Liz5050 (8/10), Verbonica (10/10).
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Question 1 of 10
1. Antonj van Leeuwenhoek spent years grinding lenses and refining microscopes and wound up literally changing the way we see the world. When he used his microscope to take a close look at lake water in the 1670s, he saw scores of what he called "animalcules". What would we call them today? Hint


Question 2 of 10
2. In 1747, James Lind performed one of the first-ever clinical trials, aboard the ship HMS Salisbury. After two months at sea, a daily ration of two oranges and a lemon cured two sailors of what deadly illness? Hint


Question 3 of 10
3. In the 1770s, Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier turned his attention to the problems of rust and combustion. His experiments established that something in the air -- oxygen -- was required to support both rusting and burning, disproving what widely held theory? Hint


Question 4 of 10
4. In the early nineteenth century, scientists struggled to find a link between two intriguing physical phenomena. In 1820, while delivering a lecture, Hans Christian Oersted found that link using a compass needle, a wire, and a battery. What two fields of study did Oersted's experiment unite? Hint


Question 5 of 10
5. In 1859, Louis Pasteur went to the lab with two glass flasks filled with a meat broth. The flasks had long, curved necks that allowed air -- but not dust -- to enter. Pasteur boiled the broth in both flasks, then broke off the neck of one -- and, days later, only the broth in the broken flask was clouded with microbial growth. What widespread theory did Pasteur disprove with this simple experiment? Hint


Question 6 of 10
6. The nature of heredity -- how parents pass along biological traits to their offspring -- has long been an object of scientific interest. Do the traits of the parents sort of blend together as the traits of their offspring? If a parent's body changes over time, can its offspring inherit the changes? In the 1860s, Gregor Mendel showed that neither of these hypotheses was true, founding modern genetics. Which test organism did Mendel study? Hint


Question 7 of 10
7. In 1887, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley conducted perhaps the most famous failed experiment of all time. At the time, it was thought that the Earth traveled through a medium called the "luminiferous ether," but the two physicists couldn't find any evidence of it with their high-precision optical setup. Why was the ether thought to exist in the first place? Hint


Question 8 of 10
8. In 1909, Ernest Rutherford, Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden directed alpha particles at a thin gold foil. Every now and then -- maybe one in 20,000 times -- the foil deflected the alpha particle straight backward. "It was almost as incredible," said Rutherford later, "as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you." What had his team discovered? Hint


Question 9 of 10
9. By the 1940s, there was mounting scientific evidence that it's the DNA molecule that allows genetic information to pass from one generation to the next. But it was hard to truly believe this without knowing how the molecule was structured. That's where Rosalind Franklin came in. She and her group used what kind of penetrating radiation to illuminate the issue? Hint


Question 10 of 10
10. In 1964, radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were troubled by a persistent noise in their telescope. The noise was in the microwave frequency range, and it was the same no matter where they pointed their telescope. It didn't even change between night and day! This "noise" turned out to be an eloquent support for what major astronomical theory? Hint



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Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. Antonj van Leeuwenhoek spent years grinding lenses and refining microscopes and wound up literally changing the way we see the world. When he used his microscope to take a close look at lake water in the 1670s, he saw scores of what he called "animalcules". What would we call them today?

Answer: Microorganisms

The presence of tiny, tiny organisms in apparently clear lake water revolutionized our understanding: suddenly, it was apparent that a whole world was hidden from the naked eye. Van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) was not the inventor of the microscope, though his significant advances in lensmaking enabled his exciting discoveries.

He had a good instinct, too, for where to look: not only lake water, but also fossils, muscle tissue, and even human saliva. (Of that last sample, he wrote to the Royal Society in 1683, "Moreover, the other animalcules were in such enormous numbers, that all the water. . . seemed to be alive.")
2. In 1747, James Lind performed one of the first-ever clinical trials, aboard the ship HMS Salisbury. After two months at sea, a daily ration of two oranges and a lemon cured two sailors of what deadly illness?

Answer: Scurvy

Scurvy is a disease of malnutrition. Unlike many other animals, human beings can't synthesize Vitamin C, but we do need it in order to make collagen, which is a critical protein in our connective tissues. Without Vitamin C, scurvy slowly develops, beginning with lethargy and continuing on through even worse symptoms, including bleeding gums, jaundice, convulsions, and death. Over time, greens and citrus fruits -- rich in Vitamin C -- gained a reputation as folk remedies for scurvy, but huge numbers of sailors and travelers still died of the disease.

Lind (1716-1794) was the ship's doctor on the Salisbury when he took six pairs of sailors who were dying of scurvy, and added a different supplement to the diet of each pair -- a clinical trial of different remedies, and thus the forebear of modern medical research. The citrus fruits were the clear winner, although problems with cost and availability meant it would be decades more before citrus was routinely available to sailors.
3. In the 1770s, Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier turned his attention to the problems of rust and combustion. His experiments established that something in the air -- oxygen -- was required to support both rusting and burning, disproving what widely held theory?

Answer: Phlogiston

Before Lavoisier's work, chemists believed that rusting and burning came about when a sort of essence of fire -- phlogiston -- was released from the material in question into the air. The air, however, could support only a limited amount of phlogiston before becoming saturated, explaining why a fire in a closed vessel (with a limited amount of air) would die down before consuming all its fuel. Even the discoverer of oxygen, Joseph Priestley, subscribed to phlogiston theory, describing the gas as "dephlogisticated air" that was simply far away from its saturation point!

To disprove phlogiston theory once and for all took some impressive experiments. Lavoisier showed that air was a mixture of gases, one that supported burning and one that did not. (The first is what we now call oxygen; the second is actually a mixture of other gases, the most prominent being nitrogen.) By heating tin in a closed vessel until it formed an ashy residue called a calx, Lavoisier showed that the tin actually increased in mass -- not what you would expect if it were emitting phlogiston. He followed up by forming a mercury calx, and showing that the air remaining in the vessel did not contain any oxygen. Even better, when he heated the mercury calx still more, the original oxidation reaction reversed and it emitted oxygen -- in the exact amount that was missing from the first vessel. There was no way for phlogiston theory to explain that!
4. In the early nineteenth century, scientists struggled to find a link between two intriguing physical phenomena. In 1820, while delivering a lecture, Hans Christian Oersted found that link using a compass needle, a wire, and a battery. What two fields of study did Oersted's experiment unite?

Answer: Electricity and magnetism

Oersted's experiment relied on a very simple circuit in which current, supplied by a battery, flowed through a wire. (The battery itself was a recent invention then, only twenty years old!) A compass needle, located by happenstance underneath the wire, rotated to point at a right angle to the wire when current was flowing. When the flow through the wire was reversed, the needle pointed the opposite way. And when the flow was stopped, the needle relaxed to its original orientation, pointing towards the north magnetic pole of the Earth.

We now know that electricity and magnetism are closely interrelated. Moving electrical charges, such as electrons flowing through a wire, produce a magnetic field; a changing magnetic field induces an electric field. Introductory physics students can tell you that you can predict the orientation of the compass's magnetic needle using the famous "right-hand rule". A current-carrying wire produces circular magnetic field lines around itself, perpendicular to the wire at every point. If you place your right hand around the wire so that your thumb points in the direction of the current flow, then the magnetic field lines point around the wire in the same sense that your fingers wrap around it.
5. In 1859, Louis Pasteur went to the lab with two glass flasks filled with a meat broth. The flasks had long, curved necks that allowed air -- but not dust -- to enter. Pasteur boiled the broth in both flasks, then broke off the neck of one -- and, days later, only the broth in the broken flask was clouded with microbial growth. What widespread theory did Pasteur disprove with this simple experiment?

Answer: Spontaneous generation

Spontaneous generation, the belief that some living organisms could spontaneously arise from non-living matter, was once a cornerstone of Western natural philosophy. Thinkers from the ancient Greeks forward proposed a whole biological universe of spontaneous generation -- maggots from meat, barnacles from rocks, fleas from dust, and crocodiles from sunlit mud. This may have been one of the most poetic scientific theories ever proposed, but we now know the idea was a real obstacle to public health.

Pasteur's takedown of the theory was anything but spontaneous. He carefully designed the swan necks of his flasks to ensure that air could flow in, but dust -- unaided by gravity and likely to adhere to the sides of the tubes -- could not. He hypothesized that microbes spread by hitching rides on airborne dust particles, so an intact neck would keep them from colonizing the sterilized contents of the flask. Pasteur was thrilled by the clear and eloquent results: "Never," he wrote, "will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow struck by this simple experiment."
6. The nature of heredity -- how parents pass along biological traits to their offspring -- has long been an object of scientific interest. Do the traits of the parents sort of blend together as the traits of their offspring? If a parent's body changes over time, can its offspring inherit the changes? In the 1860s, Gregor Mendel showed that neither of these hypotheses was true, founding modern genetics. Which test organism did Mendel study?

Answer: Garden pea plants

The choice of the garden pea was important for three reasons. First, it was easy for Mendel to control which plants bred with which; he could even breed some plants with themselves! Second, they breed fairly quickly, which is helpful for gathering data; Mendel could raise two generations of pea plants to adulthood every year. (Modern geneticists use even faster-breeding organisms, like fruit flies -- which only need two weeks from hatching to become parents themselves!) The second advantage of the garden pea is that the plant has several easily observed traits that don't have intermediate varieties. For example, the flower is always either purple or white, never lavender or pink; the stem is always either short or long, never in between. This simplified data collection and avoided confusion: the offspring's flower color would never be a blend of its parents.

In careful experiments and statistical analysis published in 1866, Mendel, a monk in what is now the Czech Republic, realized that these traits were inherited independently of each other (the Principle of Independent Assortment) and that each parent passed only one allele for each trait down to its offspring (the Principle of Segregation). (We would now describe an allele as a particular form or variant of the gene governing that trait.) The offspring's expression of the trait depends on the two alleles that it inherited from its parents. Mendel also realized the difference between dominant and recessive alleles, and even coined those terms. Although his work was largely unknown in his lifetime, it was rediscovered around 1900 and guided the development of the young science of genetics.
7. In 1887, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley conducted perhaps the most famous failed experiment of all time. At the time, it was thought that the Earth traveled through a medium called the "luminiferous ether," but the two physicists couldn't find any evidence of it with their high-precision optical setup. Why was the ether thought to exist in the first place?

Answer: It was thought to be necessary to transmit light

By this time, light was known to be a type of wave -- an electromagnetic wave. (It's also a particle, of course, but that quantum mystery still lay in the future then.) Scientists were familiar with other kinds of waves, from surf to sound, and none of these waves could travel without a medium to support them. Think of a crowd of sports fans doing "the wave": the wave moves all the way around the stadium, supported by a medium of people who don't move much. Physicists assumed that light must also travel in a medium -- the luminiferous, or light-bearing, ether, which filled all space yet was so thin that planets, moons and stars never felt its drag.

Michelson and Morley used a device called an interferometer to look for the effect of the ether on the speed of light. If the Earth travels through ether on its way around the Sun, then light should travel a little faster in the downwind direction and a lot slower in the upwind direction. The experiment took light from a lamp, and split it into two paths, each with a mirror at the end. One path went along the Earth's direction of motion and back, while the other was perpendicular; the difference in the speed of light would be evident when the light from both paths was recombined after a round trip. The experimenters were careful and thorough; they even designed the system so that the whole thing could be rotated to any angle. But they didn't find any sign of ether.

Less than twenty years later, Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity provided another way to look at light, without the need for ether at all.
8. In 1909, Ernest Rutherford, Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden directed alpha particles at a thin gold foil. Every now and then -- maybe one in 20,000 times -- the foil deflected the alpha particle straight backward. "It was almost as incredible," said Rutherford later, "as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you." What had his team discovered?

Answer: Atomic nuclei

We now know that an atom consists of negatively charged electrons orbiting around a very dense, positively charged nucleus, which is made in turn of positive protons and neutral neutrons. Most of the mass of an atom is located in the nucleus, but most of the volume is empty space. Before Rutherford's experiment it was thought that mass and charge were more evenly distributed in the volume of an atom, so they expected the dense alpha particles (a type of radiation that Rutherford had proven two years earlier were helium atoms with the electrons stripped away) to pass straight through the foil. Instead, they discovered that there was something inside the foil, even denser and heavier than an alpha particle. What's more, it was tiny; nothing else could explain how unlikely it was to be struck by an alpha.

The findings excited the scientific world, and within a decade the existence of positively charged atomic nuclei was widely accepted. Nuclear physics -- a blessing and a curse for humanity -- had been born.
9. By the 1940s, there was mounting scientific evidence that it's the DNA molecule that allows genetic information to pass from one generation to the next. But it was hard to truly believe this without knowing how the molecule was structured. That's where Rosalind Franklin came in. She and her group used what kind of penetrating radiation to illuminate the issue?

Answer: X-rays

X-rays are a type of light with high energy and therefore short wavelengths. Scientists had been using them since the 1910s to probe crystal structures: since the wavelengths of X-rays are around the same size as the features of crystals, the rays form telltale interference patterns as they pass through. Franklin was an expert at X-ray diffraction, and her group became quite skilled at crystallizing DNA under various conditions and then probing it with X-rays. Franklin's famous "Photo 51," taken by a graduate student she was supervising, showed a clear and beautiful X shape with well-defined dark and light patches. The X shape was characteristic of a helix! Meanwhile, measuring the separation of the dark and light patches allowed scientists to calculate details of the structure, such as the pitch angle of the spiral and the length of the ladder rungs.

James Watson and Francis Crick, who went down in history as the discoverers of DNA's double-helix structure, relied on this photograph as they formulated their description of the molecule. (They were shown the photograph without Franklin's permission, kicking off a controversy that still raged more than sixty years later.) This one eloquent photograph was worth a thousand words, or at least a thousand base pairs.
10. In 1964, radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were troubled by a persistent noise in their telescope. The noise was in the microwave frequency range, and it was the same no matter where they pointed their telescope. It didn't even change between night and day! This "noise" turned out to be an eloquent support for what major astronomical theory?

Answer: The Big Bang

The Big Bang Theory says that the universe has not remained in some steady, constant state for all time. Instead, it began small, and dense, and hot, and rapidly expanded from there. (In fact, as astronomers have found, it's still expanding!) The noise that Penzias and Wilson saw was essentially leftover thermal radiation from a time when the universe was still quite young, about 380,000 years after it began.

It was very dense and hot compared with today, but in the intervening billions of years the radiation has cooled, just as the universe has. Now called the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, Penzias's and Wilson's noise is intensively studied by modern scientists, who use tiny variations in the signal to learn about the earliest structures in the universe.
Source: Author CellarDoor

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