Weird Physics Facts

Are You an Einstein or a Kardashian?

Whether or not you studied physics in school, you must have learned a thing or two from all the TV shows about it. Some physics is a little mundane, but some of it is absolutely fascinating. Are we a hologram? Are there ghosts? Can we go back in time?

Take this quiz to see if you can separate fact from fiction!

• Protons, Neutrons, and Electrons were long thought to be the smallest units that made up matter. Now we know about even smaller subatomic particles that make these up. Which one is NOT a subatomic particle?

  Quirks

  Quarks

  Gluons

  Snapons
• What happens when you separate a pair of entangled protons, putting one as far as the end of the universe, and keeping one on earth?

  A huge nuclear explosion!

  Peanut butter, quantum mechanics secret miracle.

  If you move one of the protons one way, the "sister" proton will move the opposite way...no matter how far apart they are.

  They grow another proton to pair with.
• What is the "Brazil nut effect"?

  It describes the fact that in a bowl of nuts, somehow the brazil nuts and other large nuts remain on top, and the little ones are on the bottom.

  That during the World Cup, people in Brazil cannot speak coherently due to their excitement level.

  That the Brazil nut, due to it's relatively large size, attracts other large nuts like pecans, and peanuts fall to the bottom.

  Light which is bounced off a room with concave walls will travel in a Brazil nut shape if one of the walls has a magnet behind it.
• What is the state of foam (anything from soap bubbles to whipped cream)?

  50% Liquid 50% Gas

  It's just East of Arkansas.

  Solid, but just like after a Mexican lunch, sometimes liquid and gas.

  Typically 95% gas and 5% liquid, but sometimes acting as a solid. That's clear, right?
• Surface tension makes milk in a bowl cave in slightly in the middle, and also curve upward around the bowl's edge. For this reason, pieces of the cereal near the edge float upward and cling to the edge, but cereal in the middle of your bowl dents the milk's surface, creating a dip. This is why cereal seems to be on the side or in the center of the bowl. What do scientists call this phenomenon?

  The Miley Cyrus Paradox

  The Cheerios Effect

  The Captain Crunch Momentum

  Delicious
• What is NOT one strange effect of the earth's magnetic fields?

  Aurora Borealis

  Moss grows mainly on the North side of a tree in the Northern Hemisphere, and on the South side of trees in the Southern Hemisphere.

  Dogs face either North or South when they poop.

  Birds migrate, then find their way back home.
• Atoms are almost entirely made of empty space. If you squished all the people in the world together, you could fit them into:

  The Houston Astrodome

  A standard sized office

  A sugar packet

  Rhode Island
• What does the double slit experiment NOT prove?

  Light is made of waves AND particles (photons), depending on whether you look at them (observer effect).

  If you look at which of two slits light goes through, light becomes a particle.

  If you wait for the light to pass through the slits, and look at the wall behind the slitted paper, you are retroactively forcing it to have already passed through one slit or the other! In other words, causality is working backwards: the your present observation is affecting the past behavior of the light.

  You can travel back in time if you jump through a slit and someone watches you.
• If you and I were moving at very different speeds, we would find that one of us aged faster than the other. Similarly, if you were closer than than I to a major gravity source like the Earth, you would age slower.

  True

  False

  True, and Dick Clark lived next to a large gravity mass, and moved at the speed of light.
• Nothing can go faster than the speed of light because:

  As an object gets closer to the speed of light, it also gains weight. Near the speed of light, that object actually gets too heavy to meet or exceed the speed of light.

  An object in motion runs out of steam at some point.

  Congress has passed a law prohibiting it.

  It would go back in time and wind up in the past...before it ever took off.
• When an electron meets its antimatter twin, a positron, what happens?

  A universe is formed.

  They fight each other in a death battle through the remainder of eternity.

  The two are annihilated in a tiny flash of energy and two photons fly away from the blast.

  They fuse together to form a normaltron.
• According to the Special Theory of Relativity:

  There is no such thing as a present, or a future, or a past.

  The closer you get to your wedding date, the more your relatives act irrationally.

  Objects dropped from a great height fall faster than from a relatively low height.

  To an ant, the grass looks like a jungle.
• Einstein's famous equation E=MC² shows us the following, except for one statement:

  Nothing in the universe just disappears.

  Energy turns into matter, and matter turns into energy.

  Increased relativistic mass (m) of a body X speed of light squared (c2) = the kinetic energy (E) of that body

  MC Hammer was a genius, and is pure energy.
• The Law of conservation of energy states that energy:

  is a state of mind.

  depends on the mass it came from.

  fluctuates according to the time of year it is observed.

  can be converted in form, but not created or destroyed.
• Approximately 95% of the Universe is made of:

  Argon

  Ether

  Dark Matter

  Asteroids