A Quiz?

Here’s a topical quiz.

Since everyone is putting quizzes up, I thought I should too.

Now there’s two ways to approach this.

1. Google, thy friend. – This is the obvious way for all internet quizzes. Use the question’s keywords and an answer shall reveal itself. Especially because most quizzes aren’t factoring in Google. This includes Wikipedia et al.

2. The manual way. – You shouldn’t use Google because then it’s not a test of your knowledge. It’s a test of your Google skills and/or the collective knowledge of the world. This quiz is designed for the manual way, and consists of questions from either old quizzes, or very obvious sort of questions. So it’s an easy/moderate thing. And for the heck of it, it’s called “20 questions” Yes. 20 questions per topic. Starts after the jump… (click on this next link to see it) —————————–Start

Scientomagicians (If people can name their quizzes as Quiztastic or InQuizItion, can do whatever the fvck I want)

1. The first mother nobel laureate to have a daughter nobel laureate. (Hint: She was married to a Frechman.)
2. Einstein won the nobel prize in…. Physics….. In the year…. 1921…. for what, pray tell?
3. This man was at various points of time, an Alchemist, a beauraucrat, a mathematician, and even a member of the country’s parliament. But he’s most famous for his physics. A one-woman man, he dropped the idea of love after his girlfriend married someone else. He also was at one time the warden of the nation’s mint, when he took on and beat the counterfeiters successfully, and he had an active interest in the Bible. Hint: His least famous work in Physics involved optics, and he published apretty good book on it.
4. I lost my nose in a duel, and had a metalic replacement made. I lived in a tower and did astronomical research.
5. This father son pair, working separately (in different scientific conditions and times you see), were knighted and awarded the physics nobels for contradicting each other. The father is far more famous. The son proved that electrons are waves, and did this by showing electron diffraction. Name either.
6. This mathematician had a very bad reputation in Italy. He used to get involved in fights, and had his tongue pierced by a sword at an early age, which left him a stammerer for eternity, which is what his surname literally means. He developed the solution to cubic equations, and got into a fight with a fellow called Cardano with whom he had shared this secret (mathematical puzzles, and solution techniques were quite the rage in renaissance Italy you know). Surname please. (And just in case, Scipione del Ferro was someone who had originally developed the solution, but our stammering duelist had worked independently toarrive at the solution.)
7. He said that science can be divided into two categories: physics and stamp collecting. In retribution, he was given the Nobel prize for Chemistry. Who?
8. Very very straightforward. What would be the average force required to lift an average apple, in SI units? [Please don't think outside the box.]
9. The 5 states of matter are?
10. Eddington’s British expedition in West Africa in 19xx was undertaken in order to take advantage of an astronomical phenomena and use the data to prove a certain theory. The theory was proven correct as the calculation agreed, and the scientist behind it became world famous. Then later experiments confirmed his place in the Pantheon of science. However, it was found out later that Eddignton’s calculations were actually flawed and had, in fact, a fortuitous cancellation of errors which brought about the correct result. Scientist or theory?
11. Fleischmann and Pons said they did it. No one in the 80’s believed them. The scientific community rejected it, as in a review committee of ‘89 had a unanimous reject vote. Then a series of comedic announcements, rejections, approvals, withdrawals, claims and counterclaims by all sorts of experimental physicists regarding this phenomena started arriving. A jury was famously evenly split in 2004 for it’s existence. A patent was accepted in 2001 by the US Patent office. There’s a web dev technology named for it, now owned by Adobe. What is it? Hint: Doc Ock did it, almost.
12. He played the drums and the bongo, participated in Brazil’s Mardi Gras in a band, went to strip clubs, dated strippers, used to pick locks, got involved in weird psychedelic experiments, came close to checking out drugs like LSD but didn’t. He was a practical joker. He was also into drawing nudes. But you call him a physicist. He won his nobel prize, fittingly, with someone called Schwinger. Who.
13. The actually rarest element on the entire planet has a very fitting name. Atomic number or name.
14. He studied under Domenico Maria Novara da Ferrara, or simply Novara. trained to be a priest, this polish guy died in very ironic circumstances. He was once a governer of a province, and had previously worked extensively with Prussia’s Diet for monetary reform. In 2003, Poland’s senate declared “He distinguished himself for the country as exceptional mathematician, economist, lawyer, doctor and priest, as well as defender of the Olsztyn Castle during Polish-Teutonic war.” Name?
15. Last physics question. Promise. (This is the most famous “back-of-envelope” calculation, by the way. And it’s adapted from [http://sci.mercer.edu/]) Before the bomb detonated, he had torn a sheet of notebook paper into small bits. Then, as he felt the first quiver of the shock wave spreading outward through the still air, he released the shreds above his head. They fluttered down and away from the mushroom cloud growing on the horizon, landing about two and a half yards behind him. After a brief mental calculation, he announced that the bomb’s energy had been equivalent to that produced by ten thousand tons of TNT. Sophisticated instruments also were at the site, and analyses of their readings of the shock wave’s velocity and pressure, an exercise that took several weeks to complete, confirmed his instant estimate. Who.
16. He invented a new system of medicine. Conducted experiments on himself and family. Died due to Arsenic poisoning as a result. Name.
17. He once wrote about Darwinian evolution, famously so. One of the greatest Darwinian authors ever, his works on evolution had inspired Douglas Adams (yes… that Douglas Adams) to take up evolutionary biology for study when he began to get disillusioned by the state of comedy (ref: The Salmon of Doubt). He’s all over the american media these days (check out digg.com once you’re done with the quiz) duking it out with his detractors thanks to his last book, X (It’s title would have been a dead giveaway). Today, he’s quoted as the leading atheist, and dedicated the book X to Douglas Adams. Name him. If you’ve read X, I’ll give you a packet of Parle G biscuits when we meet. I swear.
18. Before William Whewell in 1833 started using this word, these guys were called ‘Natural Philosophers’. Who, or what word? (Same word)
19. Schrodinger’s cat, the Twin’s paradox of relativity, Maxwell’s demon (with the trapdoor between two containers for molecules of gases et al), The turing machine and the ‘infinte monkeys on a typewriter” are all examples of what?
20. Saint Albert, Patriarch of Jerusalem is the patron saint of a lot of things, but you should shout this one out… what?

Fiction. (Okay.. it’s not fiction. It’s…) Science Fiction

1. Easy. Douglas Adams’ middle name please.
2. I want the original name of the very first Kwisatch Haderach.
3. Everything started with a project called “the ends of earth”… what?
4. BBC radio 4: Simon Jones. TV: Simon Jones. Celluloid- who?
5. The tower of babel, Metaverse, The Rat Thing, hackers in 3d cybersace, and the hero/protagonist is a half korean half black samurai-cum-hacker. What book?
6. He has two asteroids to his credit. He was a “radical atheist”. He had a society with a name like IngSoc in Oxford for him, where he had nothing to do with it. He was a firm believer in darwinian theories and became a natural conservationist-cum-activist. His works were, by self-admission, affected by Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Sheckley.
7. What was the Treaty of Park Avenue? (Can’t be framed easier than this. Look at the topic please.)
8. [from wikipedia] He wrote or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 9,000 letters and postcards, and has works in every major category of the Dewey Decimal System except Philosophy. (Another Parle G packet if you know before hand what the Dewey Decimal system is).
9. Fictitious character Andrew Wiggin’s brother was Locke on newsnet (a female name) and his sister Valentine was Demosthenes (male). They rallied world political opinion despite being kids. Years later, Andrew wrote “The Hegemon” about Peter, the leader of Earth. He also wrote “The Hive Queen”… both signed off as… what? What was his pseudonym?
10. There was a short story written I believe before 1942, carrying a prediction that Hitler will die, committing suicide in a bunker in 1948, in his last stronghold – Madagascar. Author please.
11. This short novel X was intended as a satirist piece, and came to be seen as an antithesis to 1984’s future view, though it was published a decade before Orwell’s piece. It features lots of Shakespeare (the title is from Miranda’s speech in The Tempest), and it perfectly describes aspects of modern society. Wikipedia says this for the follow up to the novel X, he believed when he wrote the original novel that it was a reasonable guess as to where the world might go in the future but in X Revisited he concluded that the world was becoming much more like X much faster than he thought. The protagonist is revealed halfway through the book, and the book itself features a throttling of science. The author’s brothers and half brothers were noted biologists (it was written in pre-DNA times) and the book features Henry Ford as the God substitute for the age and the assembly line as being everywhere, including and especially in embryo development and child rearing. It also features many of the world leaders’ names mashed togetherto form character names. Example: Sarojini Naidu, Karl Marx, Benito Mussolini and Mustaph Kemal Ataturk along with Rudolph Diesel, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Charles Darwin. The book X please. [Yes, that's a take that question for DU types. Torture redefined.]
12. The Sprawl Trilogy: _________, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive.
13. Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Paycheck – Connect.
14. Connect: Rakhi Sawant, George Orwell, Douglas Adams.
15. I couldn’t resist this. A picture question. Solve the puzzle. [Image copied off Wikipedia.]… the author mentioned that there were 10 solutions to the problem, each yielding the same answer… if you know the reference, that is.
16. In 1982 a special issue of the journal Ambio was devoted to it, including an article by Paul Crutzen and J. Birk. In 1983 the TTAPS study (from the initials of the last names of its authors, R.P. Turco, O.B. Toon, T.P. Ackerman, J.B. Pollack, and X) detailed it, and by 1986, it was seen as a legitimate concern. Who and what.
17. I say: “Xena should be called Rupert.” Name the book.
18. Who’s Elijah Bailey, again?
19. “Long ago, the astronomers had exhausted Greek and Roman mythology; now they were working through the Hindu pantheon. And so 31/439 was christened ….” … what?
20. In the game StarCraft, the Zerg race has the Overmind, and supervisory Overlords. Name the short story that inspired the terminology, or the author at least.

———-Pause.

More later.

3 more topics to go.