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Worksheets

20th Century Physicists

Total questions: 14

Worksheet time: 7mins

Name
Class
Date
1.

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?

a)

Niels Bohr

b)

Albert Einstein

c)

Enrico Fermi

d)

Max Planck

2.

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

a)

France

b)

England

c)

United States

d)

Germany

3.

Who won the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physics?

a)

Albert Einstein

b)

George Gamow

c)

Louis de Broglie

d)

Richard Feynman

4.

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).

a)

Enrico Fermi

b)

Albert Einstein

c)

Louis de Broglie

d)

Werner Heisenberg

5.

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

a)

Albert Einstein

b)

George Gamow

c)

Niels Bohr

d)

Louis de Broglie

6.

Who predicted the existence of quarks?

a)

Murray Gell-Mann

b)

Paul Dirac

c)

Robert Millikan

d)

J. Robert Oppenheimer

7.

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

a)

George Gamow

b)

Enrico Fermi

c)

Werner Heisenberg

d)

Max Planck

8.

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?

a)

Niels Bohr

b)

Ernest Rutherford

c)

Erwin Schrödinger

d)

Richard Feynman

9.

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?

a)

George Gamow

b)

Louis de Broglie

c)

Niels Bohr

d)

Ernest Rutherford

10.

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

a)

Ernest Rutherford

b)

Max Planck

c)

Erwin Schrödinger

d)

Werner Heisenberg

11.

Who allowed quantum theory to move forward in the early 20th century by correctly modeling how an object radiates heat, solving the ultraviolet catastrophe, which was a predicted unbounded increase in the amount of radiation emitted at high frequencies?

a)

Werner Heisenberg

b)

Max Planck

c)

Louis de Broglie

d)

Albert Einstein

12.

Who's gold foil experiment provided the first evidence that each atom is made up of a large, positively-charged nucleus, surrounded by a cloud of negatively-charged electrons?

a)

Max Planck

b)

Erwin Schrödinger

c)

Ernest Rutherford

d)

Werner Heisenberg

13.

Who formulated both the time-independent and time-dependent Schrödinger equations, which are partial differential equations that describe how quantum systems behave. Schrödinger’s work was the basis for Heisenberg’s matrix formalism, Feynman’s path-integral formalism, and quantum mechanical perturbation theory, which considers the effects of a small disturbance to a quantum system?

a)

Ernest Rutherford

b)

Erwin Schrödinger

c)

Richard Feynman

d)

Max Planck

14.

Who was one of the first to attempt a generalization of quantum theory to relativistic speeds, the result of which was the Dirac equation?

a)

Paul Dirac

b)

Robert Millikan

c)

Wolfgang Pauli

d)

J. Robert Oppenheimer