Zero Gravity: The Lighter Side of Science

Create Your Own Physics Crossword Puzzle!

Certain editors of APS News are hopelessly addicted to crossword puzzles, a compulsion we suspect is shared by many of our readers. So imagine our delight at discovering a free software program that lets us create our very own puzzles. It’s inspired us to announce yet another contest for APS members around the globe. We hereby invite you to submit physics-themed crossword puzzles of your own creation.

The puzzles can be as easy or as difficult as you like, on any topic, subfield, person, era of history, theme, etc., with one restriction: no equations. (Save those for the Sudoku puzzle contest.) Submissions will be evaluated based on creativity and degree of difficulty–admittedly subjective criteria.

We’re kicking things off in this issue with a special “Modern Physics Review” crossword puzzle, created in 2005 by James Alexander, a student at St. Mary’s High School in Manhasset, New York. You can download the free software to create your own physics-related puzzle here: http://www.greeneclipsesoftware.com/eclipsecrossword/download.html

And feel free to check out the rest of St. Mary’s physics teacher Tony Mangiacapre’s award-winning educational Web site: http://www.smgaels.org/physics/home

The deadline for puzzle submissions is September 1, 2006. The winner will receive a fabulous prize and the proverbial 15 minutes of fame by having his or her name and puzzle featured in an upcoming issue of APS News. Send submissions to editor@aps.org, or, by snail mail, to Editor, APS News,The American Physical Society, One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740.

Create Your Own Physics Crossword Puzzle!

Clues

Across

2. The protons are found in the____.
4. A photon's energy varies directly with its___.
6. The atom is mostly______space.
9. 6.63 x10^-34 Js is_____constant.
12. An antiparticle has the same____ but different charge of a particle.
15. When going up an energy level, energy is___.
18. Light is both a wave and a_____.
20. If the atom were a football stadium, the nucleus would be a____.
22. The nuclear force is short-range and very _____.
23. The energy needed to remove an electron from an atom is called  the____ energy.

Down

1. The color_____ has the highest frequency.
3. E=mc² was discovered by_____.
5. Up, Down, and Charm are all different types of_____.
7. The electron's antiparticle is called a______.
8. The "lost mass" of an atom that is converted to binding energy is    _____ _____.
  (2 words)
10. Inside orbits have____energies than the outside ones.
11. Light energy is carried in discrete units called_____.
13. One____ converts to 931 MeV.
14. ______are small enough to show a wave behavior.
16. The particles smaller than an atom are called_____particles.
17. When going down an energy level, energy is____.
19. Rutherford used___particles in his Gold Foil experiment.
21. The current atom model is the______model.