Who Deserves Credit? Trivia Quiz

Answer: Leucippus

Little is known of Leucippus, his existence is shrouded by mystery, but several Greek scientists and philosophers cite him in their works as the instructor of Democritus and the originator of the idea that all matter is made up of tiny, indivisible, indestructible particles that he called 'atoms'. In the modern era, atomic theory was revived by early 19th-century English scientist John Dalton, but true theoretical progress was not made on the nature of atoms until Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr came along in the early 20th century.

Answer: Hero

Hero is another ancient genius lost in obscurity, and perhaps rightly so since his steam-powered turbine, which he called his 'aeolipile', never caught on with the public. The era of steam power would have to wait another 1700 years!

Answer: Regiomontanus

Regiomontanus, aka Johannes Muller, made careful observations of the famed comet over two centuries before the man for whom it is named. Halley's name is attached for the simple fact that he was the first to discover the period of the comet, 76 years. The comet was so well known in historic times that it made an appearance on the Bayeux Tapestry, a work of art commemorating the Norman conquest of England.

Answer: Nicholas of Cusa

Nicholas of Cusa was not only a Renaissance scholar, but also a cardinal of the Roman Catholic church! His work entitled 'De Docta Ignorantia' (Of Learned Ignorance, 1440) was clearly his greatest achievement. Therein, well before Copernicus who published in 1543 on his deathbed, Nicholas expounds on the nature of our solar system; that the Earth rotates on its axis and that the planets revolve around the sun in an infinite universe. Because of his high church ranking, Nicholas received no censor and no excommunication despite the subversive nature of his ideas.

Answer: Leibniz

The story behind the invention of the calculus is one of the most fascinating and controversial in the history of science. According to gathered evidence, two men independently developed the basic ideas behind differential calculus within a decade of each other, they being the German Gottfreid Leibniz and the Englishman Isaac Newton. Apparently, Newton came up with his theory first, some time in the 1660s, while Leibniz developed his ideas early in the next decade. Newton, who was notorious for jealously hiding his ideas from the public, failed to publish his theory before Leibniz, who published his ideas first in 1684. Publishing three years later, Newton attempted to stake claim to the discovery of calculus, and the heated rivalry was on! Both had a number of allies on their side during the debate, which became vicious when accusations of plagiarism flew.

In the end, during his lifetime, Leibniz was largely discredited, with the English Royal Society deciding for Newton as the originator of the ideas behind calculus.

However, today, both men are given credit for independently originating this all-important branch of mathematics.

Answer: Simon Stevin

Stevin overthrew the Aristotlean law of falling bodies several years before Galileo made his famous experiments. Both discovered that different weighted objects fall at the same velocity, proving that weight is not a factor in determining how fast objects fall when subject to gravity.

However, both acknowledged that objects such as feathers are subject to wind resistance and therefore will appear to fall more slowly than a ton of bricks, or something else of greater mass.

Answer: Ignaz Semmelweiss

Semmelweiss was an Hungarian obstetrician (1818-1865) working in Vienna. He discovered that puerperal fever, caused by uterine infection, resulted from a lack of antiseptic procedures in the birthing process. He wrote about his discovery, but his writings did not take hold among members of the health care public. It took the highly publicized work of British surgeon Joseph Lister (1827-1912), who developed clean sterilization techniques using carbolic acid, to spread the good work about asepsis.

Answer: Alfred Russel Wallace

Darwin's most important book, fully entitled 'The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life', was issued contemporaneously with Wallace's in 1858 before the Linnean Society. While Darwin's chief investigations had occurred in South America, and most famously the Galapagos Islands, Wallace had done most of his work in the East Indies.

Answer: Carl Scheele

While Priestly first isolated oxygen in his laboratory in 1774, the Swedish apothecary Carl Wilhelm Scheele had done so at least the year before, if not prior. Scheele failed to publish anything about his discovery until 1777, when he produced his 'Treatise on Air and Fire'. Scheele also discovered the elements chlorine and manganese, along with the compounds silicon tetrafluoride, hydrofluoric acid, and a number of others. If full realization of the implications of oxygen's discovery is taken into account, it was French chemist Antoine Lavoisier who truly may be labeled the 'discoverer' of oxygen.

It was he who crashed the theory of 'phlogiston', and established that oxygen was the necessary element for combustion.

Answer: Francesco Redi

Though William Harvey asserted that 'all living things come from an egg', which in essence is a condemnation of the theory of spontaneous generation, he never made any effort to prove this idea in the laboratory. Francesco Redi (1621-97), a Florentine physician, made very specific experiments using meat and flies.

He showed that fly larvae (which he called 'worms') did not form on meat that was sealed in containers, while non-sealed meat, to which flies had access, developed fly larvae. Another Italian physician, Antonio Vallisnieri, came to the same conclusions as Redi following his own experiments -- insects come from eggs and are not spontaneously generated. Pasteur, working several centuries later, was the first to prove that bacteria also could not be spontaneously generated (he had the good fortune of superior microscopic equipment), thus finally destroying the spontaneous generation myth. Thus concludes this quiz, I hope you have prospered from the information herein...thank you for playing!