Game: Quiz

[Kalah]

Deadline is 2 days away...

[Robenhagen]

Thanks for bumping the thread ... and answers are sent.

[Symeon Star-Eyes]

Mine are in

[Kalah]

Good... OK, I'm off to work now, so I won't have time to end the round before later this evening.

[Robenhagen]

That's not at all acceptable - we want the answers now!

[LordHoborgXVII]

never mind
Edited out answers

[Gaidal Cain]

Err- you're supposed to send the answers to Kalah by PM

[Kalah]

Yeah... Note to everybody: It's always a good idea to check out the whole topic, at least post #1, before you participate.

Anyway, here are the

Answers, round #4:

1. Rowan did not have a beard because his girlfriend hated it.
2. The song "The boys are back in town" is sung by "Jefferson Starship".
3. Lakoon, the soothsayer, warning about the Trojan horse.
4. F1 is "owned" by Bernie Ecclestone.
5. The Caspian Sea and Lake Superior are the largest.
6. Einstein got the Nobel for his work on the Photoelectric effect (that light moves in "wave packages", photons, not in a contiuous stream).
7. Harald Hardrade died first, and then Harald Godwinson - who beat him - then lost to William the Conquerer.
8. The fish caught in -38 was a Coelacanth.
9. The alpaca is used mostly [only] for wool production, while the llama is a beast of burden.
10. Yes. 1 minute, 6 seconds. They disagreed, though. Didn't have stopwatches.

Scores:
Robenhagen: 23
Vlad976: 23,5
a55a55in: 14,5
Symeon: 13
ScarlettP: 5

A good round for Symeon and Vlad, but a55a55in was the only one who got the alpacca question... Next round coming shortly.

[Kalah]

This is probably the last round, unless we have a tie. I'm gonna be really busy the next couple of weeks.

Round #5

1. In their first fight, Max Schmeling beat Joe Louis by exploiting his only weakness. What was this weakness?
2. Which thread got most replies in the old forum?
3. Who took the silver medal in the men's 10 km cross country pursuit in the 2002 Olympics?
4. What would Brian Boitano do if he were here today?
5. What's the first anachronism in "A Knight's Tale" ?
6. Which Star Trek character abducted his boss and fled at a record-breaking Warp +10?
7. Can different alcohols cancel out one another's effects in humans?
8. When CM4 was first released, it contained bugs. Which very serious bug, relating to making small clubs big, was not fixed until the following year's expansion, CM03-04?
9. How many pins (total) does a standard broadband internet plug have?
10. Which part of the Earth did the designer win a design award for?

Deadline March 4th.

[[T]osHiro]

Do't you think VLad should be in 1st place, leading by 0.5 points away from Robenhagen.

Oh, and I wouldn't get the alpaca question without the help of.....Encarta

[Gaidal Cain]

6. Einstein got the Nobel for his work on the Photoelectric effect (that light moves in "wave packages", photons, not in a contiuous stream).

Not quite. The photoelectric effect in itself means that when you shine a light on a metal, electrons are emitted. To explain it, Einstein used Planck's assumption that energy is quantised, but one does not have to suppose the existance of photons for it to work.

[Kalah]

Yeah, yeah... *caugh*geek*caugh*

[Corribus]

6. Einstein got the Nobel for his work on the Photoelectric effect (that light moves in "wave packages", photons, not in a contiuous stream).

Not quite. The photoelectric effect in itself means that when you shine a light on a metal, electrons are emitted. To explain it, Einstein used Planck's assumption that energy is quantised, but one does not have to suppose the existance of photons for it to work.

Well, you defined what the photoelectric effect is... but the reason why Einstein's work won the nobel prize - i.e., its contribution to physics - was as Kalah said. I guess it depends on how you read his sentence... so - you're both right!

Interestingly enough, of the four of Einstein's Annus Mirabilis papers, three of them are often considered Nobel-Prize worthy. I suspect the PE paper was the one that actually won it because it was published first. The "lesser" (pulished last) of the four papers, ironically enough, is probably his most famous in popular culture, as it was in this paper that the famous E = mc2 equation was published for the first time.

[Banedon]

As far as I know Einstein didn't win the Nobel Prize for the other paper(s) was because Relativity was considered too controversial for it. After all, Relativity did away with absolute time, and that was something that went against common sense.

[Corribus]

As far as I know Einstein didn't win the Nobel Prize for the other paper(s) was because Relativity was considered too controversial for it. After all, Relativity did away with absolute time, and that was something that went against common sense.

That may be true, but Planck's hypothesis (which Einstein adopted in his photoelectric effect paper) also went against all common sense. Many physicists, including I believe Niels Bohr, did not then accept the quantization of energy either until it started explaining a lot of other problems with classical physics. The quantization of energy is, of course, the basis of quantum theory. But you may be right, as even by the standards of quantum theory, relativity was (and is) "out there".

[Kalah]

Why can't discussion be this lofty in my RTW topic?

[Gaidal Cain]

As far as I know Einstein didn't win the Nobel Prize for the other paper(s) was because Relativity was considered too controversial for it. After all, Relativity did away with absolute time, and that was something that went against common sense.

From what I understood, it was because the chairman of the Nobel board couldn't accept the theory of relativity, but they got so overwhelmed by all the nominations for Einstein that they went with the photoelectric effect in the end.

And as I said, photons wasn't the big conclusion to be drawn from the photoelectric effect- it was that the internal energy of the metal was quantised. The quantised nature of light (i.e. photons) doesn't come in at all.

[Corribus]

And as I said, photons wasn't the big conclusion to be drawn from the photoelectric effect- it was that the internal energy of the metal was quantised. The quantised nature of light (i.e. photons) doesn't come in at all.

This is not true. The whole problem with the photoelectric effect before the concept of photons was introduced was that (A) the kinetic energy of ejected electrons did not scale with the intensity of incident light and (B) at lights of a certain "color", electrons were also no longer ejected. At the time, the energy of light was supposed to be related to the intensity of the light, not the color. By quantizing light into "photons" whose energy was dependent on the wavelength, or color, it was then possible to explain the experimental observation of the photoelectric effect. While this idea was originally Planck's, to solve the so-called "UV Catastrophe" in black-body radiation, Planck only applied his quantization condition to the vibrational motion of electrons in a hot body in somewhat of an ad-hoc manner. He never extended the quantization condition to light and in fact believed that once light was emitted from the black body, it behaved as a classical wave. It was Einstein who took this idea one step further and proposed that light itself had quanitzed energy in order to solve the photoelectric effect problem.

I quote, from McQuarrie and Simon:

To explain [the photoelectric effect's experimental observations], Einstein used Planck's hypothesis but extended it in an important way. Recall that Planck had applied his energy quantization concept, E = nh(nu) or (delta)E = h(nu), to the emission and absorption mechanism of the atomic electronic oscillators. Planck believed that once the light energy was emitted, it behaved like a classical wave. Einstein proposed instead that the radiation itself existed as small packets of energy, E = h(nu), now known as photons. Using a simple conservation of energy argument, Einstein showed that the kinetric energy (KE) of an ejected electron is equal to the energy of the incident photon (h(nu)) minus the minimum energy required to remove an electron from the surface of a particular metal (phi). In an equation KE = 0.5mv^2 = h(nu) - phi, where phi, called the work function of the metal, is analogous to the ionization energy of an isolated atom.

You can read more about the actual paper that einstein wrote here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_Papers.

[Gaidal Cain]

Ahh. You're right of course. My fault for only glancing through my litterature and reading that "radiation can only transfer energy to the electrons in the form of quanta", and not reading the end part which makes clear what really is quantised.

[Corribus]

There is no reason to be ashamed. And as you no doubt just realized - I still have to go back and reread it from time to time in order to make sure I have it right. It's a subject that is difficult to be correct in all the time. A good deal of time, when discussing QM on the fly, I have to go back later and correct myself. Besides which I did not understand QM very well at all until I had taught it twice.