Meghnad Saha Memorial Science

and Astronomy Quiz

Main Round
Doodle Round
 Answers
• 100th Anniversary of Flight
• Landing of the Spirit Rover on Mars
• Leonardo da Vinci’s Birthday
• Large Hadron Collider
• Samuel Morse’s Birthday
• Pi Day
Clockwise
1. Whose Statue
2. ________ is the only U.S.
President to hold a patent for
inventing a new and improved
manner of combining adjustable
buoyant air chambers with a
steam boat or other vessel for
the purpose of enabling their
draught of water to be readily
lessened to enable them to pass
over bars, or through shallow
water, without discharging their
cargoes
Abraham Lincoln
3. What is being referred to in this
comic?
Kepler
 4.

In August 2010, Vinay Deolalikar shot to fame because he

claimed to have the proof of a major unsolved problem in
theoretical computer science. He received wide spread
internet and press attention, and his proof was described
as "seeming to be a relatively serious attempt" by leading
specialists. The proof has since been reviewed by
academics, and it has been found to contain irreparable
conceptual level flaws.
Which problem did Vinay Deolalikar claim to have solved?
5.

X was a fictional creature in Douglas Adams’ “Hitch-hiker’s Guide to

the Galaxy”. It supposedly takes the brainwaves of the another’s body
and what they are thinking, and then transmits the thoughts to the
speech centers of the hosts brain.

X is also the name of a popular web-service originally developed by

AltaVista, and now acquired by Yahoo! .
 6.
On the last day of February in 1953, he announced to the
patrons of the Eagle Pub in Cambridge, “We have
discovered the secret of life”. What is being described?
7. The world's most notable physicists met in
October 1927 at the Fifth Solvay International
Conference on Electrons and Photons to discuss the
newly formulated quantum theory.
Einstein remarked
about Heisenberg's
Uncertainty Principle,
"God does not play
dice." __________
replied, "Einstein,
stop telling God what
to do."
Niels Bohr
8. Connect:
Accidental discoveries/inventions
 9.
As the shock wave hit Base Camp, Aeby saw
__________with a handful of torn paper. "He was
dribbling it in the air. When the shock wave came it
moved the confetti. He thought for a moment." ________
had just estimated the yield of the first nuclear explosion.
It was in the ball park.

He was famous for getting quick and accurate answers to

problems which would stump other people. Later on, his
method of getting approximate and quick answers
through back-of-the-envelope calculations became
informally known as the ‘_________ method'.
 Enrico Fermi's strips-of-paper
estimate was ten kilotons of
TNT; the actual yield was about
19 kilotons
10. What is this known as?
Sierpinski Triangle
11. “ By shortening the labours, the invention of
__________ doubled the life of the astronomer.” –
Pierre Simon Laplace.
John Napier
12. K.R. Sridhar was the director of the Space
Technologies Laboratory at the University of Arizona,
which was asked by NASA to come up with ways to
make life sustainable on Mars. The team then made
a device to use solar power and Mars water to
power a reactor cell that made oxygen to breathe
and hydrogen to power vehicles. When NASA
cancelled the project, Sridhar started working on
reversing the process, using oxygen and hydrogen to
create power. In 2002, he started a company earlier
called Ion America. What is the name of the new
energy-efficient and environmentally friendly fuel
cell launched by them in 2010.
Bloom Box
13. Because of his prolific output, friends created the ___
number as a humorous tribute; he alone was assigned
the _____ number of 0 (for being himself), while his
immediate collaborators could claim an _____ number of
1, their collaborators have _____ number at most 2, and
so on. Approximately 200,000 mathematicians have an
assigned ______ number, and some have estimated that
90 percent of the world's active mathematicians have an
_____ number smaller than 8.
It is said that Baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron has an
_____ number of 1 because they both autographed the
same baseball when Emory University awarded them
honorary degrees on the same day.
Erdős Number after Paul Erdős
14. What is being shown here?
 Tennis for Two
The first video game using a graphical display
(an oscilloscope to be precise)
LVC
+50/-25
+50/-25
+40/-20
+40/-20
+30/-15
+30/-15
+25/-10
+25/-10
+20/-10
+20/-10
+10/-5
+5/0
Zodiac Constellations
Anti-Clockwise
1. While Grace Hopper was working on a Mark
II Computer at Harvard University in 1947, her
associates discovered a moth stuck in a relay
and thereby impeding operation.

What computer
terminology has
its birth in this
incident?
Debugging
 2.
In computing the terms X and Y are used to describe the
used to describe the order of individually addressable
sub-units (words or bytes) within a longer data word
stored in external memory.
The terms X and Y were introduced in 1980 by Danny
Cohen in his paper "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace".
Cohen's paper refers to Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan
Swift (1726), wherein two religious sects of Lilliputians
from the neighbouring countries of Lilliput and Blefuscu
have bifurcated themselves as X and Y.
Identify X and Y.
Big – Endian and Little - Endian
3. When X showed Y this
magazine cover, Y arranged for
a meeting with the Altair
manufacturers claiming to
have a working interpreter. X
worked on a simulator for the
Altair while Y developed the
interpreter. Which company
was formed as a result of this
meeting and who are X and Y?
X: Paul Allen
Y: Bill Gates
4. The Wardenclyffe
Tower was intended for
commercial trans-
Atlantic wireless
telephony, broadcasting,
and to demonstrate the
transmission of power
without interconnecting
wires.

This tower was also shown in the Nolan movie,

The Prestige. Which scientist designed it?
Nikola Tesla
5. This stamp is a tribute to which
personality?
Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller
6. Identify the device
Light Saber
 7. Name the scientist and his
experiment that led to the calculation
of the value 1.5924×10−19 C
Robert Millikan performing his Oil
Drop Experiment
 8.

HAL 9000 is the sentient on-board computer of the Discovery One

spacecraft. All it’s capabilities were based on the speculation of
respected scientists when the film/book was released in 1968.

As 2001 approached, it became clear that the film's depiction it’s

abilities was too optimistic. Capabilities such as natural language
processing, lip reading, and commonsense reasoning on it’s part
were still science fiction. The film is not optimistic enough in one
respect, however: it is incapable of printing onto loose leaf paper,
instead giving a report via punch card.

Name the film or book.

9.
10. Identify the structure and the occasion.
Taipei 101 on the 100th year anniversary
of the theory of relativity.
11. Name the Genius
Leonhard Euler
12. The name was inspired by a puzzle question
that Vincent Connare heard within Microsoft
headquarters. The question was "can you make a X
that could launch a person from main campus to
the new consumer campus about a mile away?
Mathematically, is it possible and how?" and Mr.
Connare "thought that would be a great name for a
font that launches words across the Internet".
13. Various trees are claimed to be the tree which __X__
describes. The King's School, Grantham, claims that the
tree was purchased by the school, uprooted and
transported to the headmaster's garden some years later.
The staff of the [now] National Trust-owned Woolsthorpe
Manor dispute this, and claim that a tree present in their
gardens is the one described by __X__. A descendant of
the original tree can be seen growing outside the main
gate of Trinity College, Cambridge, below the room __X__
lived in when he studied there. The National Fruit
Collection at Brogdale can supply grafts from their tree,
which appears identical to Flower of Kent, a coarse-fleshed
cooking variety.
14. Arthur Sasse wanted to get _______ smiling on
his birthday. _____ was tired, and so, in order to
get rid of the photographer, he did something
which Sasse took a picture of. On June 19, 2009,
the photograph was auctioned at a record $74,324,
the most for any picture of _____. Fill in the blanks
and tell us what he did
Feynman
Name the Father of the Optical
Fiber
Narinder Singh Kapany