Great Scientific Mistakes Quiz – Printable Version
20 multiple-choice questions with an explained answer key, ready to print.
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- Which 1887 experiment failed to detect the 'ether', an invisible medium thought to carry light?
- A. Rutherford's experiment
- B. Foucault's pendulum
- C. The Michelson-Morley experiment
- D. Millikan's experiment
- Why was the announcement of 'cold fusion' by two chemists in 1989 rejected?
- A. Governments banned it
- B. It worked too well and scared people
- C. No laboratory managed to reproduce the results convincingly
- D. The chemists admitted it was a joke
- What was 'polywater', a supposedly anomalous form of water that fascinated researchers in the late 1960s, in the end?
- A. Water from outer space
- B. Water contaminated with impurities, including the experimenters' sweat
- C. Radioactive water
- D. A new six-atom molecule
- Which French scientist disproved 'spontaneous generation' with his famous swan-neck flasks?
- A. Louis Pasteur
- B. Marie Curie
- C. Lavoisier
- D. Buffon
- Where does the Italian word 'malaria' come from?
- A. From the name of the doctor who discovered it
- B. From a Sicilian town
- C. From the Latin for 'sea sickness'
- D. From 'mala aria', bad air, blamed for spreading the disease
- How did Australian doctor Barry Marshall prove that a bacterium, not stress, caused stomach ulcers?
- A. He operated on hundreds of patients
- B. He observed ulcers in plants
- C. He swallowed a culture of Helicobacter pylori himself and developed gastritis
- D. He interviewed Buddhist monks
- What age did Irish Archbishop James Ussher give the Earth in 1650, dating Creation to 23 October 4004 BC?
- A. About 6,000 years
- B. About 4.5 billion years
- C. About 1 million years
- D. About 100,000 years
- Why did physicist Lord Kelvin badly underestimate the Earth's age in the 19th century?
- A. He used the wrong unit
- B. He didn't know that radioactivity heats the Earth's interior
- C. He thought the Earth was flat
- D. He relied on the Bible
- What does the Greek word 'atomos', which gave us 'atom', mean?
- A. Tiny
- B. Invisible
- C. Uncuttable, impossible to divide
- D. Eternal
- Why is electric current conventionally shown flowing from '+' to '−', when electrons actually flow the other way?
- A. Because electrons are positive
- B. Benjamin Franklin chose that direction in the 18th century, long before the electron was discovered
- C. Because of a printer's mistake
- D. Because batteries are fitted backwards
- What were the consequences in the USSR of agronomist Trofim Lysenko's doctrine, which rejected genetics?
- A. Record harvests for thirty years
- B. The invention of GMOs
- C. Agricultural failures and the persecution of many geneticists
- D. The space race
- Why is the idea of a 'ladder of life', running from 'lower' to 'higher' beings, misleading?
- A. Because bacteria are bigger than humans
- B. Because species don't evolve
- C. Because the ladder should be horizontal
- D. Evolution forms a branching bush: all living species have been evolving for just as long
- What did phrenology, very fashionable in the 19th century, claim?
- A. To cure with plants
- B. To read a person's character and talents by feeling the bumps on their skull
- C. To predict the future from the stars
- D. To measure the speed of thought
- What did Percival Lowell, convinced that Martians had dug canals, found in Arizona?
- A. A Mars-themed amusement park
- B. An astronomy university
- C. An observatory, from which the dwarf planet Pluto was discovered in 1930
- D. A radio station
- According to 19th-century calculations, how long could a Sun made of coal have shone?
- A. About 10 billion years
- B. Only a few thousand years
- C. Forever
- D. About a million years
- What energy source really makes the Sun shine, rather than the gravitational contraction imagined in the 19th century?
- A. Burning coal
- B. Uranium radioactivity
- C. The energy of the auroras
- D. Nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium in its core
- Before plate tectonics, how was the presence of the same fossils in Africa and South America explained?
- A. By ancient 'land bridges' that supposedly sank into the ocean
- B. By animals swimming across the Atlantic
- C. By fossils carried by sailors
- D. By pure coincidence
- Which head mistake long affected the Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus skeletons displayed in museums?
- A. They were given a Tyrannosaurus head
- B. The head was mounted backwards
- C. They had been given a short, rounded Camarasaurus skull, as the right one hadn't been found
- D. They had no head at all
- Where did the very first reconstructions place Iguanodon's pointed thumb?
- A. On its tail, like a sting
- B. On its nose, like a rhinoceros horn
- C. On its back, like a fin
- D. Under its chin, like a beard
- Which parts of the marine predator Anomalocaris were first described as different animals?
- A. Its appendages, taken for a shrimp, and its mouth, taken for a jellyfish
- B. Its eyes, taken for snails
- C. Its tail, taken for a fish
- D. Its fins, taken for seaweed
Answer key — Great Scientific Mistakes Quiz
- C. The Michelson-Morley experimentIf the Earth moved through a stationary ether, the speed of light should have varied with direction.
- C. No laboratory managed to reproduce the results convincinglyMartin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons claimed to produce nuclear fusion energy in a simple jar at room temperature.
- B. Water contaminated with impurities, including the experimenters' sweatFormed in tiny glass tubes, this water seemed thicker and didn't freeze at 0 °C.
- A. Louis PasteurPeople believed maggots arose from meat and microbes from broth.
- D. From 'mala aria', bad air, blamed for spreading the diseaseAccording to miasma theory, epidemics came from the smells and vapours of marshes.
- C. He swallowed a culture of Helicobacter pylori himself and developed gastritisNobody believed a bacterium could survive stomach acid. Faced with scepticism, Marshall infected himself in 1984, then cured himself with antibiotics.
- A. About 6,000 yearsBy adding up the Bible's genealogies, Ussher reached a precise date, long printed in the margins of English Bibles.
- B. He didn't know that radioactivity heats the Earth's interiorKelvin calculated how long an originally molten Earth would take to cool to its present state, getting a few tens of millions of years, too little for Darwin's evolution.
- C. Uncuttable, impossible to divideThe Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus imagined matter made of indivisible grains.
- B. Benjamin Franklin chose that direction in the 18th century, long before the electron was discoveredFranklin saw electricity as a single fluid, in excess (+) or deficit (−).
- C. Agricultural failures and the persecution of many geneticistsBacked by Stalin, Lysenko claimed he could transform plants by 'training' them to the cold.
- D. Evolution forms a branching bush: all living species have been evolving for just as longThis 'great chain of being', inherited from antiquity, placed humans near the top.
- B. To read a person's character and talents by feeling the bumps on their skullAccording to Franz Joseph Gall, each faculty occupied an area of the brain that bulged the skull as it grew.
- C. An observatory, from which the dwarf planet Pluto was discovered in 1930A wealthy businessman, Lowell built an observatory at Flagstaff in 1894 to study Mars.
- B. Only a few thousand yearsEven made of the best fuel, a chemically burning Sun would have run out very quickly on a geological timescale.
- D. Nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium in its coreThe contraction proposed by Kelvin and Helmholtz gave the Sun only a few tens of millions of years.
- A. By ancient 'land bridges' that supposedly sank into the oceanPeople imagined giant isthmuses linking the continents, then sinking without trace.
- C. They had been given a short, rounded Camarasaurus skull, as the right one hadn't been foundWith no skull found with the skeleton, late 19th-century palaeontologists chose that of another sauropod.
- B. On its nose, like a rhinoceros hornGideon Mantell only had scattered bones when he described Iguanodon in the 1820s.
- A. Its appendages, taken for a shrimp, and its mouth, taken for a jellyfishFound separately in Canada's Burgess Shale, the fragments each got their own name.