The Shortest FunTrivia Quiz ever written

Answer: F

In what is probably the most confusing combination of quantity and unit symbols, capacitance is shown as a C, but the unit is a farad (F), named after Michael Faraday, a 19th century English physicist and chemist whose most important discoveries include the laws of electrolysis.

Answer: J

The symbol used for energy is the capital E (although you will occasionally see a lowercase one, especially when quoting Einstein's E=mc squared). James Prescott Joule, after whom the unit was named was a 19th century English physicist whose work mainly centered around the interaction of heat and mechanical work, one of the most fundamental energy transformations in technology.

Answer: N

The capital F, often shown with an arrow above it to indicate its vector nature, denotes force. The associated unit is the newton, named for Isaac Newton, a late 17th and early 18th century English physicist and mathematician whose most important work in physics include the theory of gravity and the laws of motion.

Answer: m

I hope you didn't confuse the lowercase l - standing for length - with the capital I indicating electric current. The unit of length is of course the meter, originally defined as the 40-millionth part of the Earth's equatorial circumference but now derived from the second via the speed of light in a vacuum.

Answer: g

I've taken a minor liberty here in using the gram for mass (indicated with an m) instead of the kilogram, which is the actual base unit. During the 18th century work in France during which the early fundamental units were first defined, the gramme was defined as the mass of a cubic centimeter of water while the grave was a cubic decimeter's worth. Since there could not be two names for the same thing, the name "grave" was replaced with the kilogramme (one thousand grammes), but for precision reasons, the actual definition was taking the larger unit.

Keeping the kilogram as the actual unit in today's system in spite of the awkward situation regarding prefixes (a milligram isn't one thousandth but one millionth of the base) is mostly owed to the fact that all derived units such as the Newton use the kilogram in their definition; a change to use the gram as a base would necessitate a redefinition of all those derived units.

Answer: W

Like so many of the units related to energy, the unit of power is named after a British researcher, in this case Scotsman James Watt, inventor of the first efficient steam engine, which was at the time - the late 18th and early 19th century - the most available source of power. Unlike most of the other namesakes, Watt was mostly an engineer and inventor and not much of a researcher of theoretical principles.

Answer: C

The other half of the confusing pair related to stored electricity is the charge (indicated with a Q), and measured in coulombs. Charles-Augustin de Coulomb was a French physicist of the late 18th century and his core work was about electrostatic forces. He was also an accomplished military engineer and did some important work on friction.

Answer: K

When dealing with physical quantities, capitalization is important. The capital T stands for temperature, while, as seen in the next question, time is denoted with a lowercase t. The associated unit, kelvin, is named after William Thomson, first Lord of Kelvin.

He originated the first and second laws of thermodynamics in the late 19th century. The kelvin as a unit is based on the degree Celsius, having the same step size, but a different origin point: Celsius measurements take the freezing point of water as the zero, while kelvin ones use absolute zero. Note that, unlike the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales, kelvin measurements do not use "degree"; it is simply "40 kelvin".

Answer: s

The second was originally defined as the 86400th part of a mean solar day, but as the length of a day is variable (it gradually becomes longer due to tidal effects), it was changed to a multiple of a specific subatomic transition time of a cesium atom. Atomic clocks make use of this particular transition to provide an extremely precise timer.

Answer: V

The capital V is ambiguous as a quantity symbol; it can stand both for electric potential and volume. However, the context should always make it clear which of the two is asked for. The unit of potential, the volt, is named for Italian physicist Alessandro Volta who built the first practically usable batteries.