Trivia Quiz

1. What is the coldest spot ever recorded on earth?

a. Chandalar Lake, Alaska
b. Vostok, Antarctica
c. Yakutsk, Russia
d. Ulaan-baatar, Mongolia

2. If you take nitrogen gas and bring it down to -196 C it will turn into a

a. Solid
b. Bose-Einstein condensation
c. Liquid
d. It will remain a gas

3. Animals can’t survive freezing temperatures because

a. Ice steals water from their cells
b. The sharp points in ice can destroy cells
c. Ice swells and destroys blood vessels
d. All of the above

4. What is the temperature of space?

a. Absolute zero
b. 2.7 degrees above absolute zero
c. 53.4 degrees above absolute zero
d. Room temperature

5. Why can we never achieve absolute zero?

a. Because whatever was holding it would break
b. Because time would stop
c. Because if anything got that cold it would evaporate and disappear
    completely
d. Because atoms can never stop moving completely

6. Who were the first people to achieve a BEC?

a. Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman, and Wolfgang Ketterle
b. Gabriel Fahrenheit, Anders Celsius and Lord Kelvin
c. John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and Bob Schrieffer
d. Alfred Wolff, Stuart Cramer, and Willis Carrier

7. How did the Fahrenheit scale get its name?

a. The word means heat scale in German
b. It was named after the coldest city in the world, Fahrenheit, Norway
c. It was named after the inventor Gabriel Fahrenheit
d. It derived from “far in height” since the first thermometers were so  
     tall

8. Things become cold because

a. The cold seeps in
b. Because the heat seeps out
c. Because the atoms inside stop moving completely
d. All of the above

9. The faster atoms go the _____the material is.

a. Hotter
b. Colder
c. Wetter
d. Quicker

10. At what temperature does air liquefy?

a. Absolute zero
b. 0 C
c. 32 F
d. -193 C

11. At what temperature does water freeze?

a. 0 Celsius
b. 32 Fahrenheit
c. 273.15 Kelvin
d. All of the above

12. One low-temperature physicst is the only person to win two Nobel Prizes
       in physics. That person was...

a. Albert Einstein
b. Gabriel Fahrenheit
c. John Bardeen
d. James Dewar

13. What happens if you bounce a rubber ball that’s been frozen in liquid nitrogen?

a. It bounces without ever stopping
b. It shatters like glass on the floor
c. It melts into a puddle
d. It’s so hard it breaks through the floor

14. When a solid turns into a gas without becoming a liquid first it is called

a. Sublimation
b. Evaporation
c. Disposition
d. Melting