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A physical property is any property of a physical system that is measurable. [1] The changes in the physical properties of a system can be used to describe its changes between momentary states. A quantifiable physical property is called physical quantity. Measurable physical quantities are often referred to as observables.
An intrinsic property is a property that a thing has itself, including its context. An extrinsic (or relational ) property is a property that depends on a thing's relationship with other things. For example, mass is an intrinsic property of any physical object , whereas weight is an extrinsic property that varies depending on the strength of ...
An extensive property is a physical quantity whose value is proportional to the size of the system it describes, [8] or to the quantity of matter in the system. For example, the mass of a sample is an extensive quantity; it depends on the amount of substance. The related intensive quantity is the density which is independent of the amount.
A physical body as a whole is assumed to have such quantitative properties as mass, momentum, electric charge, other conserved quantities, and possibly other quantities. An object with known composition and described in an adequate physical theory is an example of physical system .
The final column lists some special properties that some of the quantities have, such as their scaling behavior (i.e. whether the quantity is intensive or extensive), their transformation properties (i.e. whether the quantity is a scalar, vector, matrix or tensor), and whether the quantity is conserved.
A material property is an intensive property of a material, i.e., a physical property or chemical property that does not depend on the amount of the material. These quantitative properties may be used as a metric by which the benefits of one material versus another can be compared, thereby aiding in materials selection.
A characteristic property is a chemical or physical property that helps identify and classify substances. The characteristic properties of a substance are always the same whether the sample being observed is large or small. Thus, conversely, if the property of a substance changes as the sample size changes, that property is not a characteristic ...
A scalar in physics and other areas of science is also a scalar in mathematics, as an element of a mathematical field used to define a vector space.For example, the magnitude (or length) of an electric field vector is calculated as the square root of its absolute square (the inner product of the electric field with itself); so, the inner product's result is an element of the mathematical field ...