These questions are to be read aloud by the scientist host. Teams
will have two minutes to submit the answer to each question on a
sheet of paper (be sure to include team names) and hand in each
sheet for scoring. The host will give the answer for each question
before moving to the next one.
Scientist host should take out a cell phone and loudly pretend to
place a call to someone a few hundred miles away in another state.
After "hanging up," the scientist should ask the group for a show of
hands to indicate who they think heard his or her words
first—the Kaffeehaus guests in the back of the room (about 10
meters/30 feet away), or the friend in another state. The answer may
surprise some, but it gets back to the speed of light. Cell phones
carry signals as electromagnetic radiation (that is, at light
speed). Light speed is 900,000 times faster than the speed of sound
traveling through the air of the room. So the scientist's voice made
it to the other state before it made it across the room to the
people's ears.
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Einstein was fascinated by the nature of light. One interesting
thing about light is that although it appears white, it can be
broken out into a spectrum of different colors by passing the
white light through a prism. What are the colors of the rainbow
from longest wavelength to shortest?
Answer: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. (Also
acceptable is red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo,
violet—forming the familiar mnemonic ROYGBIV. The labels
used for colors are arbitrary and while indigo is no longer
commonly used, it is included to make the sequence easier to
remember.)
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What was the name of the top-secret U.S. government program to
build the atomic bomb?
Answer: The Manhattan Project
-
What radioactive element was used in the bomb that was dropped
on Hiroshima?
Answer: Uranium;
offer bonus point for naming specific isotope uranium-235
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Einstein was working as a patent clerk in Switzerland when he
arrived at E = mc2. A particularly notable patent that was awarded within the
last few years was to inventor Dean Kamen for the Segway Human
Transporter. What was the code name for this invention?
A: "Ginger" is the code name for the Segway Human
Transporter. Also acceptable, "IT" (rhymes with "fit").
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How long does it take for light to travel from the sun to Earth?
- 10 seconds
- 85 minutes
- 850 minutes
- 10 minutes
- 8.5 minutes
Answer: (e) 8.5 minutes
-
This Hollywood comedian who starred in the movie
¡Three Amigos! wrote a play called
Picasso at the Lapin Agile about a fictional meeting
between Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso.
Answer: Steve Martin
-
What instrument did Albert Einstein play starting at the age of
five?
- Trombone
- Violin
- Piano
- Accordion
Answer: (b) Violin
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Working after Einstein proposed his famous equation, Lise
Meitner was the first to show that a uranium atom can be split,
converting a tiny amount of mass into a prodigious amount of
energy in accordance with the formula E= mc2. What is the name of this splitting process?
Answer: Fission
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Suppose you have a light bulb shining on a page of a book. Now
you move the bulb half the distance closer to the page. How much
more intense will the light be on the page?
Answer: 4 times more intense.
The intensity of the light has an inverse squared
relationship to its distance from the page. 1/(1/2)2 = 4
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Ten-Point "Make or Break" Question
Note to host: Remind players that they can wager up to 10
points on this question. Points will be added to team
total for a correct answer and subtracted for an
incorrect answer.
To what institute did Einstein come when he immigrated to the
United States?
Answer: Institute for Advanced Study (located in
Princeton, New Jersey, but not affiliated with Princeton
University)
