Saturday, November 14, 2009

Examples of scalars

Some examples of scalars include the mass, charge, or the temperature, or electric potential at a point inside a medium. The distance between two points in three-dimensional space is a scalar, but the direction from one of those points to the other is not, since describing a direction requires two physical quantities such as the angle on the horizontal plane and the angle away from that plane. Force cannot be described using a scalar, since force is composed of direction and magnitude, however, the magnitude of a force alone can be described with a scalar, for instance the gravitational force acting on a particle is not a scalar, but its magnitude is. The speed of an object is a scalar (e.g. 180 km/h), while its velocity is not (i.e. 180 km/h north).

Examples of scalar quantities in Newtonian mechanics:

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