General Science Quiz: Famous Scientists and Their Laws

In Einstein's special theory of 1905 the energy required to accelerate a body with mass rises without limit as its speed approaches that of light, so such a body can come close to but never reach the speed of light in vacuum, which is the same for every observer.

Thomson. Working with cathode rays in a discharge tube in 1897, he showed that the rays were a stream of negatively charged particles far lighter than any atom, and he measured their charge to mass ratio, which established the electron as the first known subatomic particle.

By bombarding beryllium with alpha particles he obtained a penetrating radiation that could not be bent by electric or magnetic fields, and he showed it to consist of neutral particles of about the mass of a proton, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Working on the observations of Tycho Brahe he found that a planet moves in an ellipse with the sun at one focus, that the line from the sun to the planet sweeps equal areas in equal times, and that the square of the orbital period is proportional to the cube…

Pressure applied to an enclosed liquid is transmitted equally and undiminished in every direction, so a small force on the narrow master cylinder of a brake creates a much larger force on the wide piston at each wheel, which is also how a hydraulic press and a hydraulic lift work.

His experiments on garden pea, in which he followed single characters such as seed shape and flower colour through generations, gave the laws of dominance, segregation and independent assortment, and showed that inheritance works through discrete factors rather than a blending of parental traits.

Ohm found that for a metallic conductor at a steady temperature the ratio of potential difference to current is a constant, the resistance, which is written as V equals I into R, so doubling the voltage doubles the current.

His study of the characteristic X-rays of the elements showed that the nuclear charge, the atomic number, is the quantity that rises regularly from element to element, and the modern periodic law therefore states that properties are a periodic function of atomic number.

Raman announced in 1928 that light scattered by a transparent medium contains components of changed wavelength, a shift that reveals the energy levels of the scattering molecules, and the Nobel Prize in Physics followed in 1930, making him the first Asian to receive a Nobel in a science.

A cosmic ray physicist who founded the Physical Research Laboratory at Ahmedabad, he persuaded the government that a poor country needed space technology for communication, weather and education, set up the rocket launching station at Thumba and built the organisation that became the Indian Space Research Organisation.