Capacity is the ability to hold a fluid, very similar to volume.
Capacity may also refer to:
- Capacity utilization, in economics, the extent to which an enterprise or a nation actually uses its potential output
- Capacity (law), the legal ability to engage in certain acts, such as making a contract
- In decision theory, a capacity is a subjective measure of likelihood of an event, similar to a membership function in fuzzy logic
- Capacity of a set, in mathematics, one way of measuring a set's size
- Battery capacity, in electrical engineering, a measure of a battery's ability to store electrical charge
- Heat capacity, in physics and chemistry, the amount of heat required to change a substance's temperature
- Carrying capacity, in biology, the ability of an environment to sustain populations
- Channel capacity, in communications
- Combining capacity, in chemistry, number of chemical bonds formed by the atoms of a given element
- Nameplate capacity, in power plants, the general number of Megawatts technically available
- Capacity factor, in power plants, an operations ratio
Famous quotes containing the word capacity:
“Mankind’s common instinct for reality ... has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life’s supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man’s frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity’s language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity’s disappearance.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“Just as we are learning to value and conserve the air we breathe, the water we drink, the energy we use, we must learn to value and conserve our capacity for nurture. Otherwise, in the name of human potential we will slowly but surely erode the source of our humanity.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)