Builders of Science Trivia Quiz

Answer: Edmond Becquerel

The photovoltaic effect is when a material, most commonly metal, is excited by electromagnetic radiation, light, and a voltage can be detected. It is closely related to the photoelectric effect, a phenomenon later studied extensively by many physicists. The difference between the two is that in the photoelectric effect, an electron is discharged out of the material, whereas in the photovoltaic effect the excited electron is still in the material, it is now creating a surface current on the material.

In 1839, Edmond Becquerel devised a way to show how the photovoltaic effect works. Nowadays, the effect is everywhere, from full-sized solar panels to calculators who have miniaturized versions that don't need batteries to work.

Answer: Carl Wilhelm Scheele

Oxygen is a highly-reactive element with an atomic number of 8. It is a non-metal and is often associated with life, as oxygen is used for breathing. In terms of commonality, oxygen is the third most common element on Earth after hydrogen and helium, the two lightest elements. Because of oxygen's three outer-shell electrons which are free to move, it is often found in an oxide with other elements.

Carl Wilhelm Scheele was a pharmacist of Swedish-German nationality. In a series of experiments in 1771 -1772, he discovered what he called "fire air" because it aided and was necessary for combustion. He discovered it before Joseph Priestly, however, it was Priestly who published his results first. This is why Scheele is often overlooked when credit is given for the discovery. The French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier claimed to have discovered oxygen on his own, and he was the one who coined the name, but, modern findings have shown that Priestly had been in contact with Lavoisier describing his earlier findings.

Answer: Jocelyn Bell Burnell

A pulsar is a neutron star that is highly magnetic and emits electromagnetic radiation out of the two poles of magnetism. Since the radiation is directional, we can only detect it if one of the poles of the pulsar is pointed at Earth. However, when it is pointed in our direction, the energy burst is strong and easy to detect. Due to the nature of neutron stars, the electromagnetic energy emitted comes in short, precise burst that come at regular intervals.

The first pulsar was detected by Jocelyn Bell. She was a graduate student at the time and detected "a bit of scruff" coming from a chart used to observe the sky. When she rechecked that area of sky, she saw that these pulses were coming at an uncanny regularity and hoped it was a beacon from an extraterrestrial civilization. However, when more were found, she realized that these were pulses coming from a neutron star. Though her research found the first pulsar, the credit went to her supervisor, including the Nobel Prize. Nevertheless, Jocelyn Bell Burnell (as her married name became known) was able to make a name for herself in astrophysics.

Answer: Marie Curie

Polonium is a highly radioactive element, therefore, very unstable and difficult to isolate. It has an atomic number of 84 and it is similar in its chemical properties to selenium and tellurium. The half-life of its most common isotope, Po-210, is quite fleeting, in a general sense, of only 138 days.

Marie Curie and her husband Pierre discovered polonium when they extracted it from a uranium core. They identified that there was an element in the uranium that had a much stronger radioactivity. Marie Curie named it after the country of her birth, Poland.

Answer: Albert Einstein

General relativity is a theory that explains gravity in a four-dimensional space-time. It states that the universe is not as flat as Newtonian gravity suggests, and that objects with mass will create 'dips' in the spacetime continuum. The larger the mass, the bigger the dip. This is why massive objects can (and do) distort even light that passes close to them, leading to an effect called gravitational lensing.

Albert Einstein published this theory in 1915, ten years after he published a paper on special relativity. Despite the groundbreaking work that was achieved by this paper, Einstein was not happy with it as it failed to reconcile gravity with the other three forces, weak, strong, and electromagnetic. His goal of a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) was not achieved in his lifetime.

Answer: James Chadwick

In an atom, there are three main building blocks, a negatively-charged electron flying around a positive nucleus, and in the nucleus, there are positively-charged protons and neutrally-charged neutrons. Because of their lack of charge, the neutron was the last of these particles to be detected. They carry a weight nearly identical to that of the proton, however, and fluctuations in weight by discrete amounts were measured between different isotopes of the same element.

In 1932, the neutron was discovered by physicist James Chadwick. He found that a certain radiation was emitted that could not be explained by gamma rays. He devised more experiments that found that there was a particle with the same mass as a proton but no mass, henceforth known as a neutron.

Answer: Willard Libby

No, radiocarbon dating is not the process by which atoms meet, fall in love, and eventually get married... Radiocarbon dating is the process used to determine the age of organic matter. By measuring the amount of carbon-14 in matter, and knowing its decay rate, one can actually mathematically measure the age of an object.

Organic matter contains specific ratios of the radiocarbon (Carbon-14) and when it dies, it begins decaying. Willard Libby won a Nobel Prize for the concept in 1960.

Answer: Murray Gell-Mann

A quark is one of the building blocks of all matter. There are six differnet types (or flavours) of quarks, and they come in pairs: up and down, charm and strange, and top and bottom. When quarks combine, they form particles called hadrons, two of which you're familiar with - neutrons and protons. Quarks will combine in threes, and they have a colour charge to them. Each quark in a hadron must carry a different colour charge, one each of red, green, and blue, to combine and form a hadron which is "white" like light.

The quark model was proposed by physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig, independently of one another. They each proposed the up, down, and strange quarks, but, over time, the six-quark model was established.

Answer: Gordon Gould

A laser, which is actually an acronym for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation", is a coherent and focused beam of light (electromagnetic radiation). Lasers can be focused spatially, meaning the width of the beam of light is very narrow and will not expand the same way that a light bulb will. They can also be focused spectrally, meaning, all the beams for the light will be the same wavelength (or close to one wavelength).

The maser, which is a microwave-frequency laser, was proposed in 1951 by Joseph Weber and built in 1953 by Charles Hard Townes and his team. The laser itself was proposed by George Gould in 1957 and he applied for the patent in April 1959. There was a similar proposal from Bell Labs at the same time and the original patent was given to them, something that sparked a 28-year-long patent war.

Answer: Ernest Rutherford

Beta radiation is the emission of an electron (or a positron) from the nucleus of an atom. Beta radiation is more penetrating than alpha radiation, which is an entire nucleus of an atom, but less penetrating than gamma radiation, which is just energy. It is caused by a process known as beta decay which occurs often when there is an excess of neutrons in an atom's nucleus. Typically, the neutron will emit a W- boson which turns the neutron into a proton by flipping the spin of one of its quarks. The W- boson then decays into an electron and an electron antineutrino.

Beta radiation was detected by Ernest Rutherford, when he tried to explain an experimental result by Henri Becquerel. Rutherford found that uranium emits particles that can be stopped by black paper, whereas others are able to penetrate the paper and show up on a photographic plate. The results were published in 1899.