20th Century Physicists

Which physicist reconciled Rutherford’s results from the gold foil experiment with Max Planck’s quantum theory to create a model of the atom (the Bohr model) in which electrons resided in specific energy levels at specific stable radii?

• Niels Bohr

• Albert Einstein

• Enrico Fermi

• Max Planck

Where did Niels Bohr flee with his son during World War I?

• France

• England

• United States

• Germany

Who won the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physics?

• Albert Einstein

• George Gamow

• Louis de Broglie

• Richard Feynman

Who authored four papers that revolutionized modern physics? The first of which explained the photoelectric effect in terms of quantized electromagnetic radiation. The second of which formed the foundation for modern statistical physics by explaining the seemingly-random motion of particles in a fluid, a behavior called Brownian motion. The third of which reconciled Maxwellian electrodynamics with classical mechanics by positing a finite, constant speed of light, a theory now known as special relativity. The fourth paper contained his statement that the energy of a body is equal to its mass times the speed of light squared (that is, E = mc2).

• Enrico Fermi

• Albert Einstein

• Louis de Broglie

• Werner Heisenberg

Who wrote a doctoral thesis, which proposed that all particles have a characteristic wavelength dependent on their momentum?

• Albert Einstein

• George Gamow

• Niels Bohr

• Louis de Broglie

Who predicted the existence of quarks?

• Murray Gell-Mann

• Paul Dirac

• Robert Millikan

• J. Robert Oppenheimer

Who's work with statistical physics laid the groundwork for modern electronics and solid-state technologies?

• George Gamow

• Enrico Fermi

• Werner Heisenberg

• Max Planck

Who developed a mathematical formalism called the path integral formulation of quantum theory that utilized the “sum over histories,” taking into account all possible paths a particle could take?

• Niels Bohr

• Ernest Rutherford

• Erwin Schrödinger

• Richard Feynman

Who was one of the first to explain the implications of the Big Bang theory of cosmology and correctly predicted the abundance of hydrogen and helium in the early universe, nicknamed Alpher-Bethe-Gamow theory (an intentional pun on the first three letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha, beta, and gamma, for which the otherwise unrelated physicist Hans Bethe was included), and also theorized that the the heat from the Big Bang would still be visible as the cosmic microwave background radiation?

• George Gamow

• Louis de Broglie

• Niels Bohr

• Ernest Rutherford

Who is most known for his matrix interpretation of quantum theory, which constructs observable quantities as operators that act on a system?

• Ernest Rutherford

• Max Planck

• Erwin Schrödinger

• Werner Heisenberg