世論 What Japan Thinks

I’m sure in school and university we all got our fill of scientific laws and principles that we have long-since forgotten bar the names. To see how the Japanese fare on this, goo Ranking performed this survey on remembered names but forgotton details of scientific principles.

Demographics

Between the 24th and 26th of September 2008 1,044 members of the goo Research online monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 50.6% of the sample were male, 5.8% in their teens, 12.7% in their twenties, 32.3% in their thirties, 27.6% in their forties, 12.3% in their fifties, and 9.3% aged sixty or older. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample.

I’d never heard of the Mpemba effect before, and the first one I could definitely explain is Schrödinger’s Cat. I got Einstein’s theories confused – E=mc2 is special relativity; general relativity is gravity and time dilation. I only managed three others I could recall! How did you get on?

Research results

Q: What scientific principles do you remember the name of, but don’t know the details? (Sample size=1,044)

Rank		Score
1	Pascal’s law	100
2	Joule’s law	78.5
3	Bernoulli’s principle	78.2
4	Fleming’s right hand rule	78.2
5	Ohm’s law	77.7
6	Kepler’s laws	77.1
7	Mpemba effect	76.3
8	Fleming’s left hand rule	74.7
9	Schrödinger’s Cat	74.5
10	Combined gas law	69.3
11	Newton’s second law: law of acceleration	67.4
12	Hess’s law	62.1
13	Right hand screw rule	61.8
14	Einstein’s general theory of relativity	60.9
15	Snell’s law	59.0
16	Mendel’s laws of heredity	55.3
17	Newton’s first law: law of inertia	55.1
18	Law of conservation of mass/matter (Lomonosov-Lavoisier law)	54.5
19	Foucault’s pendulum	53.6
20	Archimedes’ principle of buoyancy	52.0