1. A famous early philosopher who advocated that everyday life was only an approximation to the perfect reality of ideas was
   1. Pythagoras
   2. Aristotle
   3. Copernicus
   4. Plato


2. The fundamental force that has the smallest range of all of the forces is
   1. electromagnetic interaction
   2. strong interaction
   3. weak interaction
   4. gravity


3. A nucleus having 6 up quarks and 6 down quarks would be the nucleus of
   1. carbon
   2. helium
   3. deuterium
   4. hydrogen


4. If you brought an antiproton close to a normal electron, you could make
   1. an annihilation
   2. antihydrogen
   3. hydrogen
   4. nothing that would stay together


5. Particles with half-integer spins are called
   1. mesons
   2. hadrons
   3. bosons
   4. fermions


6. The largest particle accelerator, called CERN, has its headquarters in
   1. Texas
   2. Germany
   3. Illinois
   4. Switzerland


7. A given quark has how many possibilities for its electric and color charges?
   1. 2 and 3
   2. 1 and 1
   3. 1 and 3
   4. 2 and 1


8. The idea that "it is vain to do with more what can be done with less" is often called
   1. Plato's Dialogue
   2. Occam's Razor
   3. Popper's Philosophy
   4. Aristotelian Logic


9. Particles that continuously bombard the Earth's surface from outer space are often called
   1. leptons
   2. alpha-particle radiation
   3. cosmic rays
   4. Planck Era particles


10. If theories are oriented towards treating the human perspective as special, they are called
    1. Copernican
    2. anthropomorphic
    3. memetic
    4. anthropocentric


11. A good example of a theory that can't be falsified is called
    1. solipsism
    2. dousing
    3. the Flat-Earth Theory
    4. the World-Will-End-in-the-Year-2019 Theory


12. The Planck Era time is determined from
    1. looking at how matter and antimatter annihilate
    2. from the rate at which galaxies are receding from each other
    3. the time for the smallest particles that were created right at the beginning to decay
    4. from manipulating combinations of the fundamental constants so that units of seconds appear


13. According to the Karl Popper philosophy of science, a theory that has been experimentally confirmed represents
    1. great progress in science
    2. gives information about the underlying explanation of the phenomena
    3. both of these
    4. neither of these


14. Biologist Richard Dawkins says there are small concepts that can replicate in human culture. He calls this smallest replicating concept
    1. a thought
    2. a meme
    3. a hypothesis
    4. a falsification


15. If gravity holds you down on the floor, the force that keeps you from going through the floor is
    1. weak force
    2. nuclear force
    3. electromagnetic force
    4. none of these


16. The quarks in a baryon must
    1. be composed of three different color quarks
    2. be composed of two quarks, one the antiparticle of the other
    3. be composed of three same color quarks
    4. be of different electric charge


17. The W⁺ particle is
    1. a force carrier for the weak force
    2. a force carrier for the strong force
    3. a member of the lepton family
    4. none of the above


18. The neutrino
    1. interacts strongly with everything
    2. interacts through the strong force weakly with everything
    3. is a member of the lepton family of particles
    4. gets stopped by heavy elements like lead


19. The force that many scientists think requires the highest energy to unify with other fundamental forces is
    1. weak force
    2. gravity
    3. strong force
    4. electromagnetic force


20. In modern times, an electron accelerator can be found in almost all homes. This electron accelerator is commonly called
    1. a microwave oven
    2. a refrigerator
    3. a television set
    4. a plumbing fixture


21. In accelerators, what is used to change the direction of charged particles so that they go around the large ring tunnels?
    1. magnetic fields
    2. gluons
    3. other fast moving particles
    4. electric fields


22. The nucleus boundary between fission processes and fusion processes occurs when there are enough neutrons and protons squished together to make
    1. carbon
    2. lead
    3. iron
    4. helium


23. The Pauli Exclusion Principle states that
    1. electrons are able to occupy very similar states
    2. electrons and protons must form atoms that are overall neutral in electric charge
    3. electrons do not form states that are identical with other nearby electrons
    4. electrons must decay using the weak interaction to gamma radiation


24. The common state for a nucleus is to have equal numbers of neutrons and protons. A nucleus that has the same number of protons as the usual nucleus but has more neutrons is called _______ of the first nucleus.
    1. an ion
    2. a hadron
    3. a plasma seed
    4. an isotope


25. Radiation is released at the decoupling era of the Big Bang because
    1. nuclei have finally formed, and gamma radiation is emitted when this occurs
    2. electrons and protons have slowed sufficiently to enter into electrically-neutral bound states which don't interact as freely with photons as charged particles do
    3. the universe has cooled so much at this time that stars are finally formed, and these stars give off photons in large quantities
    4. none of the above


26. At the time when nucleosynthesis occurs, the universe has a temperature of
    1. 10³² K
    2. 10⁹ K
    3. 15 K
    4. 10⁵ K


27. Neutrinos contributing to the birth of galaxies would be acting as
1. cold dark matter
2. topological defects
3. hot dark matter
4. none of the above


28. The COBE satellite is famous for measuring
    1. the Planck black-body radiation that arrives at the Earth from all directions in space
    2. the X-rays that were emitted when the universe was 3 minutes old
    3. the highly red-shifted light from the very earliest galaxies
    4. none of the above


29. Where do astronomers look to find stars that aren't changed significantly from when they were first made from fresh Big Bang hydrogen and helium?
    1. Quasars that are at the edge of the observable universe.
    2. Towards the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
    3. In the globular clusters surrounding the Milky Way disk.
    4. None of the above.

Last edited 1933 CST, 8 January 2015