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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.
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.
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.
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 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.
In thermodynamics, a physical property is any property that is measurable, and whose value describes a state of a physical system. Thermodynamic properties are defined as characteristic features of a system, capable of specifying the system's state. Some constants, such as the ideal gas constant, R, do not describe the state of a system, and so ...
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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 property. Examples of physical properties that aren't characteristic properties are mass and volume.