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Concept
Scalar (physics)
Summary
In physics, scalars (or scalar quantities) are physical quantities that are unaffected by changes to a vector space basis (i.e., a coordinate system transformation). Scalars are often accompanied by units of measurement, as in "10cm".
Examples of scalar quantities are mass, distance, charge, volume, time, speed, and the magnitude of physical vectors in general (such as velocity).
A change of a vector space basis changes the description of a vector in terms of the basis used but does not change the vector itself, while a scalar has nothing to do with this change. In classical physics, like Newtonian mechanics, rotations and reflections preserve scalars, while in relativity, Lorentz transformations or space-time translations preserve scalars. The term "scalar" has origin in the multiplication of vectors by a unitless scalar, which is a uniform scaling transformation.
A scalar in physics 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 for the vector space in which the electric field is described. As the vector space in this example and usual cases in physics is defined over the mathematical field of real numbers or complex numbers, the magnitude is also an element of the field, so it is mathematically a scalar. Since the inner product is independent of any vector space basis, the electric field magnitude is also physically a scalar.
The mass of an object is unaffected by a change of vector space basis so it is also a physical scalar, described by a real number as an element of the real number field. Since a field is a vector space with addition defined based on vector addition and multiplication defined as scalar multiplication, the mass is also a mathematical scalar.
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