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Quiz Particles and Cosmology: Higgs, quarks and the Big Bang

From quarks to the cosmos: Standard Model, Higgs boson, Big Bang, dark matter, CMB. Eleven verified questions with clear explanations.

12 questions~6 minen
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Which particle was discovered at CERN in 2012?

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  1. Q1. Which particle was discovered at CERN in 2012?

    • The electron
    • The Higgs boson
    • The neutron
    • The neutrino
    ATLAS and CMS at the Large Hadron Collider announced the Higgs boson on July 4, 2012, completing the Standard Model. Peter Higgs and François Englert, who predicted it in 1964, won the 2013 Nobel Prize.

  2. Q2. What does the Higgs field give to elementary particles?

    • Charge
    • Spin
    • Mass
    • Colour
    Particles acquire mass through their interaction with the Higgs field. The stronger the coupling, the heavier the particle — photons don't couple at all, so they remain massless.

  3. Q3. How many quark flavours does the Standard Model contain?

    • 3
    • 4
    • 6
    • 12
    Six flavours: up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom. The top quark, the heaviest at about 173 GeV/c², was discovered at Fermilab in 1995.

  4. Q4. How old is the Universe according to the standard cosmological model?

    • About 4.5 billion years
    • About 13.8 billion years
    • About 100 billion years
    • Infinite
    The Universe is about 13.8 billion years old, derived from the cosmic microwave background measurements by WMAP and Planck. Earth, by comparison, is only about 4.54 billion years old.

  5. Q5. What is the cosmic microwave background (CMB)?

    • Radiation from the Sun
    • The afterglow of the early Universe, about 380,000 years after the Big Bang
    • Cosmic dust
    • Radio waves from black holes
    The CMB is leftover thermal radiation from when atoms first formed and the Universe became transparent. Discovered accidentally by Penzias and Wilson in 1964 (Nobel 1978), it's now about 2.725 K.

  6. Q6. What is dark matter?

    • Ordinary matter painted black
    • Invisible matter detected only via its gravitational effects
    • Light absorbed by nebulae
    • Matter that emits ultraviolet light
    Dark matter doesn't emit or absorb light but bends it gravitationally and shapes galaxy rotation. It makes up roughly 27% of the Universe's mass-energy. Its exact nature is one of physics' biggest open problems.

  7. Q7. What is dark energy?

    • Energy stored in black holes
    • A mysterious component driving the accelerated expansion of the Universe
    • Heat from stars
    • Energy that fuels the Big Bang
    Dark energy makes up about 68% of the Universe and pushes galaxies apart faster over time. Its accelerating effect was discovered by Riess, Schmidt and Perlmutter (Nobel 2011) via distant supernovae.

  8. Q8. What are the four fundamental forces?

    • Gravity, friction, magnetism, light
    • Gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear, weak nuclear
    • Newton, Einstein, Maxwell, Planck
    • Heat, pressure, motion, gravity
    Gravity is by far the weakest; the strong nuclear force binds quarks into protons and neutrons; electromagnetism handles light and chemistry; the weak force drives certain types of radioactive decay.

  9. Q9. What is a neutrino?

    • A heavy positively charged particle
    • A nearly massless, electrically neutral particle that barely interacts with matter
    • A photon's antiparticle
    • A heavy nucleus
    Neutrinos are leptons produced in nuclear reactions like those in the Sun. About 60 billion solar neutrinos cross every cm² of your skin per second, almost none stopping. They were shown to have mass in 1998 (Kajita) and 2001 (McDonald).

  10. Q10. What is antimatter?

    • Matter at very low temperature
    • Particles with the same mass but opposite charge from their matter counterparts
    • Matter heavier than uranium
    • Energy converted from heat
    Predicted by Paul Dirac in 1928 and first detected by Carl Anderson in 1932 (the positron). When matter meets antimatter, both annihilate into photons. Why the Universe contains far more matter than antimatter remains a mystery.

  11. Q11. What is the Hubble-Lemaître law?

    • The Sun rotates around the Earth
    • Distant galaxies recede faster, proportional to their distance
    • Light bends around planets
    • Black holes evaporate
    Edwin Hubble in 1929 (building on Georges Lemaître's 1927 work) showed v = H₀·d. The current value of H₀ is roughly 70 km/s per megaparsec, giving direct evidence the Universe is expanding.

  12. Q12. Which particle accelerator discovered the Higgs boson?

    • Tevatron at Fermilab
    • Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN
    • SLAC
    • RHIC at Brookhaven
    The LHC, a 27-km ring straddling the France-Switzerland border, collides protons at up to 13.6 TeV. The 2012 discovery used data from its ATLAS and CMS detectors, two of the largest scientific instruments ever built.

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