Examples in Classical Physics
Some examples of scalars include the mass, charge, volume, time, speed, 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). Other examples of scalar quantities in Newtonian mechanics include electric charge and charge density.
An example of a pseudoscalar is the scalar triple product (see vector), and thus the signed volume. Another example is magnetic charge (as it is mathematically defined, regardless of whether it actually exists physically).
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