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:
“It is part of the educator’s responsibility to see equally to two things: First, that the problem grows out of the conditions of the experience being had in the present, and that it is within the range of the capacity of students; and, secondly, that it is such that it arouses in the learner an active quest for information and for production of new ideas. The new facts and new ideas thus obtained become the ground for further experiences in which new problems are presented.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)
“Forgetting: that is a divine capacity. And whoever aspires to the heights and wants to fly must cast off much that is heavy and make himself light—I call it a divine capacity for lightness.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can’t know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do—after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world’s anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)