Thinking Outside the Box Trivia Quiz

Answer: Girolamo Fracastoro

Girolamo Fracastoro was born in the late 15th century in the Italian city of Verona. He was well known for his knowledge of medicine, and after studying at the University of Padua he was appointed to a professorship. Despite a long career in science, the proposition for which he is best remembered came in 1546 at the age of 70. Fracastoro proposed that infectious diseases such as cholera were transmitted by tiny 'spores', thus initiating what is now called the germ theory of disease.

The miasma theory of disease held that diseases were transmitted by a mist released from decomposing matter. Despite the theory being discredited, diseases such as malaria still use a name derived from the idea of 'bad air'.

Answer: Nicolaus Copernicus

Nicolaus Copernicus was almost a direct contemporary of Girolamo Fracastoro, living from 1473 to 1543. He studied mathematics, medicine and economics in addition to the astronomy for which he is best remembered. His most famous work is 'On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres', in which he put forward his ideas that the Sun, rather than the Earth, is at the centre of the universe.

Despite the fact that Copernicus himself has also now been shown to be incorrect, the idea of planets orbiting the sun was a significant step in the right direction from the idea that the Sun orbited the Earth.

Answer: Antoine Lavoisier

The French scientist Antoine Lavoisier was born in the mid-18th century, and is widely regarded as one of the fathers of modern chemistry. His creation of the first list of elements (beyond the five classical elements) included phosphorus, zinc and mercury, and paved the way for Dmitry Mendeleev's Periodic Table of the Elements in the 19th Century.

Despite his many discoveries, Lavoisier was unable to escape the terror of the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century, and was guillotined in 1794.

Answer: Friedrich Wöhler

Friedrich Wöhler (1800-1882) was a German chemist. He is regarded as one of the fathers of organic chemistry (the chemistry of those compounds that contain carbon) thanks to his discoveries in organic synthesis - the creation of more complex molecules from component parts.

The belief that a living organism possessed some 'vital force' had been the common consensus for many centuries. However, as scientific instruments such as the microscope became more powerful, and disciplines such as biochemistry and molecular biology became more viable, the scientific community shifted to the idea that life actually comes from the correct assembly of otherwise non-living matter. Despite this gradual change, Wöhler's synthesis of the compound urea is often seen as a turning point away from the 'vital force' school of thought.

Answer: Pythagoras

Pythagoras was an Ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher who lived in the 6th Century BCE. While he is perhaps best remembered today for his namesake theorem of right-angled triangles, Pythagoras was also extremely influential in the field of philosophy, with both Plato and Aristotle being prominent exponents of his work.

Given that ancient civilisations were not able to fly up in the air and see that the Earth was round, the notion that the Earth was flat survived for many millennia. While many different thinkers contributed to the change in point of view, Pythagoras' writings are thought to be some of the earliest in support of the spherical Earth model.

Answer: Michelson and Morley

Luminiferous aether was a substance proposed to explain the seemingly wave-like behaviour of light through a vacuum when this was not believed to be possible. The Michelson-Morley experiment attempted to detect the aether by measuring the speed of light in different directions through the so-called 'aether wind'. The experiment failed to detect any difference, thus suggesting that no such aether existed.

Both Albert Michelson and Edward Morley were American physicists during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Whilst they are best remembered for the Michelson-Morley experiment, they did not work together for their entire careers, and both achieved significant fame in their own right. In 1907, Michelson won the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and meterological investigations carried out with their aid", making him the first American scientist to win a Nobel Prize.

Answer: Sadi Carnot

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot was born in Paris in 1796, and contributed a large amount to science in his relatively short life (he died from cholera age 36). He is best remembered for his namesake 'Carnot cycle', which provides an upper limit on the efficiency of an engine. While he was barely appreciated while alive, his work was extensively drawn upon by Rudolf Clausius and Lord Kelvin in the 1850s and he is thus known as the 'father of thermodynamics'.

Caloric was proposed to be a weightless gas that could move between different media to make them either hotter or colder. The currently accepted theory is what we now refer to as the mechanical theory of heat, initially proposed by Count Rumford at the end of the 18th century and developed by Carnot in the 19th.

Answer: Ibn al-Haytham

The theory that the human eye uses eye beams to see is known as 'extramission theory'. The contrary theory, namely that light bounces off of objects into the eye was first suggested by Ibn al-Haytham and is known as intromission theory. Despite this medieval discovery, an academic study in 2002 showed that many adults still believe in emission theory.

Ibn al-Haytham was an Arab polymath who lived in the 10th and 11th Centuries CE. While his best known work is the 'Kitāb al-Manāẓir' (literally 'Book of Optics'), he is also notable as an early supporter of the idea that hypotheses should be tested and falsifiable - what we now know as the scientific method.

Answer: Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford was born in Brightwater, New Zealand, but travelled widely and conducted experiments at both McGill University in Canada and Manchester University in the United Kingdom. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 for his work on radioactive half-life and the differentiation of alpha and beta particles (particles emitted during radiation).

Although JJ Thomson had pointed the way towards subatomic particles with his discovery of the electron in 1897, it was Rutherford who proposed that the atom consisted largely of empty space with a small, dense positive nucleus. This model of the atom is still (roughly) used today.

Since the atom has been shown to be made up from component parts, physicists have termed those particles that are thought to be indivisible as 'elementary particles'. The study of such particles makes up the active area of research known as particle physics.

Answer: Antoine Lavoisier

He's back again! Perhaps Lavoisier does deserve his 'father of modern chemistry' moniker given that he's picked up two of the answers in this quiz. He proposed the modern notion of oxidation (and thus combustion), and coined oxygen among his list of elements in 1789.

Phlogiston theory was proposed by Johann Joachim Becher in the 17th Century. Despite the fact that it is now discredited, at least it left us with some fantastic nomenclature. Combustible substances were described at 'phlogisticated', and were said to 'dephlogisticate' when they burned. What fun!