Actual Science Trivia

How a round works

Five questions, drawn from the bank by the date, so everybody in the world gets the same five on the same day and a score is worth comparing. Answer them, and the review afterwards gives you the right answer to each one and a line explaining why it is right — which is the part that makes this worth doing twice. The link you copy opens on the same five questions rather than on your score, because a link that just printed somebody’s result would be a screenshot with extra steps.

Every answer is a fact about the real world

A trivia round about a sitcom about physicists could easily have been a trivia round about the sitcom. This one is about the physics: the scattering that makes the sky blue, the third law that puts absolute zero permanently out of reach, the reason astronauts float that has nothing to do with there being no gravity up there. All of it is checkable, none of it is anybody’s intellectual property, and if one of the answers is wrong it will be fixed or removed rather than defended.

The wrong answers are plausible on purpose

A distractor nobody would pick measures nothing. Each of the wrong options here is either a common misconception — that friction is a fundamental force, that the uncertainty principle is about clumsy instruments, that entanglement could carry a message — or the correct answer to a neighbouring question. Getting one wrong should feel like nearly having it, because that is where the explanation does its work.

Settle it in the forum

The board’s forum is where the day’s round gets argued over, and where a genuinely wrong answer should be reported. Post your five.

This is fan-made, and unofficial

This is an unofficial fan page for the television series The Big Bang Theory, naming the show under nominative fair use. It is a free, unofficial fan tribute, made for fun. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Warner Bros. Television, Chuck Lorre Productions, or CBS.

Every word on this page is original writing. No dialogue, catchphrase, script text, scene, still, logo or artwork from any television series is reproduced anywhere in it, and nothing here imitates an official mark. Iron Realms — the strategy game the rest of this site is about — is an original fantasy world with its own map, its own houses and its own art, and has no connection to the world of The Big Bang Theory. This corner is kept separate on purpose, and nothing in it should be read as suggesting otherwise.

The rest of the corner

The Big Bang Theory wing also has The Whiteboard Test, and more is on its roadmap. The fan tributes hub has the Westeros, Supernatural, King of the Hill, Fringe and Last Kingdom wings alongside this one, and the free tools that are not about anybody’s fiction. If you would rather play something with more to it, Iron Realms is free and runs in a browser tab.