The Scientists Quiz

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Questions

1. How did the Ancient Egyptians calculate when the River Nile would flood each year?
2. From what did the Mayans believe the world to be made?
3. Which Ancient Greek god was thought to cause earthquakes?
4. Name the two forces which Confucius believe were central to harmony in the Universe.
5. Name one of the two influential medical books written by IbnSina.
6. Name the four most important universities founded during the 12th-13th centures.
7. What part of Tycho Brahe’s body was cut off in a duel?
8. What two methods did Vesalius use to obtain specimens for this study of anatomy?
9. Vesalius wrote one of the greatest scientific books ever published.  What was it’s title?
10. What is the name given to the tiny blood vessels that connect veins and arteries?
11. Galileo was threatened with torture unless he denied which claim?
12. Name one of the founding members of the Royal Society.
13. What incident is said to have been the starting point for Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation?
14. Linaeus developed a method of classifying plants called “binomial nomenclature”.  What does it mean?
15. Which book proposed that species had developed over long periods of time?
16. Name the two different theories concerning the structure of the earth preferred by Werner and Hutton.
17. What is the name given to the supercontinent by Wegener?
18. What was the name of the ship on which Charles Darwin sailed to South America?
19. What is the modern name for the gas that Joseph Priestley called “dephlogisticated gas”?
20. What is the name given to Mendeleev’s grouping of elements?
21. What is the name of the device Ewald von Kleist designed for storing static electricy?
22. What apparatus did Benjamin Franklin use to prove that lightning is a form of electricity?
23. Which measurement of electricity is named after an 18th century scientist?
24. Which process, discovered by Edward Jenner, is considered to be one of the most important advances ever made in medical science?
25. Who was the first person to receive two Nobel prizes?
26. On which plant did Mendel perform most of his experiments?
27. Why did Niels Bohr go to live in the USA in 1943?
28. Who was the first woman to be appointed assistant to the Court Astronomer in 1787?
29. Why was Mary Somerville’s first scientific paper submitted to the Royal Society by her husband?
30. In 1927, Georges Lemaitre propsed an idea that explained the origins of the Universe.  What is it now known as?

Answers

1. They studied the position of the moon and the stars.
2. They believed that the world was made from the back of a giant crocodile living in a pond.
3. Poseidon
4. Yin and Yang
5. The Canon and The Cure
6. Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris
7. His nose
8. Grave robbing and taking bodies from the gallows.
9. The Fabric of the Human Body
10. Capillaries
11. The Earth moved around the Sun.
12. Christopher Wren, Samuel Pepys
13. He saw an apple fall from a tree.
14. It means that each plant has two names. One indicates its genus, the other its species.
15. The Natural History by Georges de Buffon
16. The “Neptunist” theory and the “Plutonist” theory.
17. Pangaea
18. HMS Beagle
19. Oxygen
20. The Periodic Table
21. The Leiden Jar
22. A kite fitted with a metal key.
23. The volt, after Alessandro Volta
24. Vaccination
25. Marie Curie
26. The pea plant.
27. To escape the Nazis.
28. Caroline Herschel.
29. At that time, women were banned from the organization.
30. The Big Bang Theory