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Questions

  1. Sir Isaac Newton was the second scientist to be knighted, who was the first? And do you know which monarch knighted Newton?



  2. Which Austrian physicist gave his name to a physical constant relating the average kinetic energy of particles in a gas with the temperature of the gas?
  3. Charles Darwin's five-year voyage on which ship established him as an eminent geologist?
  4. Which scientist first isolated and identified benzene in 1825, and popularized terms such as anode, cathode, electrode and ion?
  5. Which British theoretical physicist shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics with Francois Englert?
  6. Name the Stephen Hawking book which appeared on the British Sunday Times best-seller list for a record 237 weeks?
  7. Which English scientist and doctor was the pioneer of the world's first vaccine, the smallpox vaccine?
  8. Which British mathematician and computer scientist, who died of cyanide poisoning, is often considered to be the father of artificial intelligence?
  9. Which Manchester University professor of particle physics is best known as the presenter of science television programmes?
  10. Which New Zealand-born physicist is often known as the 'Father of Nuclear Physics?
  11. Alessandro Volta invented the electrical battery, but which chemical compound with the chemical formula CH4 did he also discover?
  12. Which French chemist and microbiologist created the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax?
  13. Which scientist became the first person to win the Nobel Prize twice?
  14. What is the name of the molecular biologist famous for the 1953 discovery of the structure of DNA with James Watson?
  15. Who reported to the Royal Society in 1808 that he had successfully isolated four new metals which he called barium, calcium, magnium and strontium?
  16. Which Danish physicist received the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to understanding quantum theory?
  17. Born in 1824, in Belfast, by what name is mathematical physicist and engineer William Thomson better known?
  18. William Harvey’s book, On the Motion of the Heart and Blood, which reveals the circulation of blood through the body for the first time, was published in which century?
  19. Which German born British scientist is best known for the 1979 to 1986 BBC television series The Great Egg Race?
  20. In 1896, Russia's Dmitri Mendeleev published the first widely recognized what?
  21. Which Scottish science writer, once hailed as 'The Queen of Nineteenth-Century Science', gives her name to an Oxford College and also appears as a character in the 2014 film Mr. Turner?
  22. The S.I. units for the following quantities were all named after famous scientists, can you name the units for: (a) pressure, (b) capacitance, (c) frequency, (d) magnetic flux density, and (e) radioactivity?

Answers:

  1. Sir Francis Bacon. Queen Anne knighted Newton (in 1705)
  2. Boltzmann
  3. HMS Beagle
  4. Michael Faraday
  5. Peter Higgs
  6. A Brief History of Time
  7. Edward Jenner
  8. Alan Turing
  9. Brian Cox
  10. Ernest Rutherford
  11. Methane
  12. Louis Pasteur
  13. Marie Curie
  14. Francis Crick
  15. Humphry Davy (he later changed the name of magnium to magnesium)
  16. Niels Bohr
  17. Lord Kelvin
  18. Seventeenth Century (1628)
  19. Heinz Wolff
  20. Periodic table
  21. Mary Sommerville (Note: her face also appears on the new Royal Bank of Scotland £10 notes, issued in 2017)
  22. (a) pascal (after Blaise Pascal), (b) farad (after Michael Faraday), (c) hertz (after Heinrich Rudolf Hertz), (d) tesla (after Nikola Tesla), and (e) becquerel (after Antoine Henri Becquerel)





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