16 Questions that Prove that Physics Makes No Sense

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

What if this quiz does NOT exist?

This quiz makes absolutely no sense, and i love it.

Same.

I understand all these questions and how they work and yet simultaneously I understand nothing.

Another statement that makes no sense.

"How big is the universe?"

Of course, to even attempt to answer the question you have to clarify what is being asked. We can answer how big the observable universe is, for instance.

True, but for many things the scientific definition differs from popular usage or laymen's terms. When people ask how big the universe is, they often mean the observable universe.

Hi! Love the quiz, I have a minor gripe though:

In question 7. you're referring to "relativistic mass" as just "mass". It gives the quiz-taker the false idea that an objects mass changes with time, which it does not. "Relativistic mass" is an abstract concept taught to students to simplify the inherently confusing nature of relativity, but that's it, a mathematical concept abstracted from reality.

Highly suggest everyone watch these two videos on the topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnLJoeBE_BM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTJauaefTZM

or read the following paper:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ph/0602037.pdf

My mass changes with time. For instance, I just ate an ice cream sandwich and my mass is now approximately 100 g greater.

*I meant velocity, the mass doesn't physically change with velocity

I should really stop writing comments whilst sleep deprived...

AlekHek, I agree with you.

However, there is no indication in the way the question is worded that this is referring to rest mass nor invariant mass.

If the observer measuring the mass of the object was in the same reference frame as the object, and thus not observing any change in mass, the observer would also ostensibly not be observing any change in the speed of the object. So, at least to me, the question is not misleading.

I believe the question is correct.

Remember E=mc^2 which absolutely applies here: as a mass approaches the speed of light, its energy increases, but this could be equivalently interpreted as an increase in mass, tending towards infinity.

Alternatively, as the object approaches the speed of light, the force required to accelerate it at a constant rate approaches infinity (because you need infinite energy to make a nonzero mass move at the speed of light). In this interpretation, because acceleration is constant and force approaches infinity, then by Newton’s 2nd, the object’s mass must be approaching infinity.

I think it’s important to remember that mass doesn’t work like we want to think it does, just like time or light.

It sure is weird though…

Light DOES travel at the same speed through every medium, it just takes a longer path through some.

Light refracts when passing from one medium to another. It does so because it has a different velocity in each medium.

I doubt that physics makes no sense; I don't doubt that we can't make sense of physics.

About halfway through, I started expecting a question about Cyprus.

I think the trouble is convoluting reference frames. From any reference frame, nothing moves faster than light (at least nothing we can observe). So, if you are using the frame of a third party, observing two other parties each moving away from you close to the speed of light, it seems paradoxical that those two parties would be able to communicate with one another (this is a pedagogical paradox of relativity, and it's now well understood by physicists). However, from the reference frame of either of the first two parties, the other is moving away at a speed LESS than the speed of light, so communication should be possible.

So the answer to #16 may be correct, but the reasoning why is either wrong or else I did not understand the explanation.

And it does.

Good quiz. I do love the counter intuitive nature of much of modern physics. Although many (though not all) of these things do start to feel more sensible once you look deeper into them. A lot of the problem lies with how we commonly conceptualise things like matter, energy, space and time.

16. I htought the answer is because some of the stars don't exist anymore, so we can't communictae with them.

Since I'm doing a physics degree anything below full marks would've been devastating for me. I answered every question right at the end :D

i’m not quite sure why the other answers to 13 are ‘wrong’ - if they’re sufficiently advanced then of course they could do it, by definition, and including the word ‘might’ means technically the other two could be correct. maybe if you changed it to ‘which of these do scientists now believe a computer may one day be able to do’?

Schrodinger, I think I found your cat!

I think the singularity question is not really correct – my take on it would be singularities are where our current models break down. Wikipedia also says, "Physicists are undecided whether the prediction of singularities means that they actually exist (or existed at the start of the Big Bang), or that current knowledge is insufficient to describe what happens at such extreme densities."

Apart from that, nice one!

The difference is that in the first case a distance is increasing, whereas in the second space itself is expanding. It's like the difference between two points moving across the surface of a balloon and the distance between two fixed points on the surface of a balloon increasing due to the balloon being blown up.

I think the weirdest one is how both stations can communicate when they are moving close to the speed of light.

And there is another easy reason that we can't communicate with every star we see: some of them may already be destroyed since we are seeing the past.

I think this quiz is quite good overall given the fact that it covers concepts that are difficult to understand and often misrepresented, however there are a few problems with the answers:

1. Energy can only become matter if it becomes an equal amount of ordinary matter and antimatter, by the conservation of the lepton number and baryon number.

5. Singularities are theorised but have never been directly observed, since they can only appear inside a black hole.

9. Again, an equal amount of ordinary matter and antimatter have to emerge simultaneously.

12. Not all interpretations of quantum mechanics agree on this point, though I am not knowledgeable enough in this area to explain what they do agree on. I believe that when one particle changes, apparently "causing" the other to change, this is not the result of any controllable process and so no causation can be proven (only correlation).

14. This is only true if...

we assume that there is no law of physics that prevents an individual from living forever. I'm not sure whether predictions about the death of the universe rely on statistics or genuinely imply that the universe will inevitably end within a given period of time, but an assumption about this would need to be added to reach that conclusion.

1 and 9 are kind of nitpicking as you can argue that ordinary matter and antimatter are both types of matter, and 5 could be explained by adding that it is a prediction of theoretical physics and not observed. 12 and 14 need more assumptions that not all physicists agree on in order to be correct.

We are in a constant state of expansion (the big bang is an expansion not an explosion). The quiz is accurate on this point.

It's not like the singularity that produced the Big Bang was one point suspended in empty space that exploded... it was (at least) the entirety of the observable universe. So saying that it happened at just one point in the observable universe would be inaccurate, even if that's easier for us to conceptualize.