Quantity in Physical Science
Establishing quantitative structure and relationships between different quantities is the cornerstone of modern physical sciences. Physics is fundamentally a quantitative science. Its progress is chiefly achieved due to rendering the abstract qualities of material entities into physical quantities, by postulating that all material bodies marked by quantitative properties or physical dimensions, which are subject to some measurements and observations. Setting the units of measurement, physics covers such fundamental quantities as space (length, breadth, and depth) and time, mass and force, temperature, energy, and quantum.
A distinction has also been made between intensive quantity and extensive quantity as two types of quantitative property, state or relation. The magnitude of an intensive quantity does not depend on the size, or extent, of the object or system of which the quantity is a property, whereas magnitudes of an extensive quantity are additive for parts of an entity or subsystems. Thus, magnitude does depend on the extent of the entity or system in the case of extensive quantity. Examples of intensive quantities are density and pressure, while examples of extensive quantities are energy, volume and mass.
Read more about this topic: Quantity
Famous quotes containing the words quantity in, quantity, physical and/or science:
“Quantity in food is more to be regarded than quality. A full meal is a great enemy both to study and industry.”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)
“Value is the life-giving power of anything; cost, the quantity of labour required to produce it; its price, the quantity of labour which its possessor will take in exchange for it.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)
“How many young hearts have revealed the fact that what they had been trained to imagine the highest earthly felicity was but the beginning of care, disappointment, and sorrow, and often led to the extremity of mental and physical suffering.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)