Hydrometer 2026-10-31
A floating density instrument. At equilibrium, Archimedes' principle gives for fixed instrument mass , so it displaces more volume in a less dense liquid. A graduated narrow stem converts this volume change into a visible immersion reading. Calibration specifies a temperature and a reading convention for the meniscus; a sample's other dissolved substances can affect a sugar-calibrated scale.
Hydrostatic balance 2026-10-14
Vertical pressure gradient balances gravitational force per unit volume. Subtracting the resting hydrostatic state and using kinematic pressure gives for a Boussinesq approximation buoyancy anomaly. The approximation neglects vertical acceleration; this diagnostic relation is what couples buoyancy perturbation to the vertical pressure profile.
For an isotropic linearly elastic solid, equal compressive principal stresses produce three equal normal strains . Adding them gives the displayed volume strain, or bulk modulus . It is a small-strain relation using the pressure change, not an arbitrary absolute pressure reference.
Hyperspectral imaging 2026-10-25
Imaging in many narrow, usually adjacent wavelength bands. Relative to broad-band multispectral imaging, it can resolve narrower mineral absorption features in spectral reflectance, helping distinguish surface lithologies, at the cost of data volume and often reduced signal per band.
For quadratic three-dimensional dispersion below condensation, the excited-state thermal energy is proportional to . Differentiating at fixed particle number and volume gives the displayed heat capacity, with limiting value approximately at . The macroscopic ground occupation carries no excitation energy in the shifted reference. The exponent differs from the linear-phonon result of an interacting gas.
Ideal chain Created 2026-10-13 Updated 2026-10-24
An ideal chain, also called a freely jointed chain, consists of fixed-length links with independent orientations and no bending energy between successive links. It neglects segment interactions and excluded volume. A one-dimensional freely jointed chain restricts each link to two orientations. At fixed force its canonical partition function factors into one-link angular integrals. The resulting extension is entropic and depends on temperature and on whether the orientations are allowed in one, two, or three dimensions.
Ideal gas free energy Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-03
Up to volume-independent terms, , so .
Immersion freezing 2026-10-20
Ice nucleates on an inclusion already immersed in supercooled water. The interfacial nucleation barrier, inclusion properties, droplet volume and observation time affect freezing probability.
Incenter of a tetrahedron 2026-10-14
The center of the sphere tangent to all four faces is the positive face-area-weighted combination of the opposite vertices. If is the volume and the total face area, its distance from each face is . Indeed its weight for vertex is and the corresponding altitude is , so their product is the common distance. Positive weights place it inside the tetrahedron.
Incompressible flow Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-13
An incompressible flow preserves the volume of each moving fluid element. Its local condition is zero velocity divergence, . Combined with mass conservation, it says that each parcel's mass density stays unchanged as it moves. This does not require every parcel to have the same mass density: an initially nonuniform distribution can be transported without compression. Nor does incompressibility require a constant velocity or constant pressure.
For positive mass density, the continuity equation makes the equivalence precise:
The material derivative follows a fluid element. Thus if and only if the velocity field is a divergence-free vector field. The distinction between following a parcel and observing a fixed position prevents confusing incompressibility with an unchanging density field. [ref]
For a rigid pipe with impermeable walls, no leaks and steady flow, mass conservation at constant mass density implies a constant volumetric flow rate:
Here points downstream, is the section's area and is the mean normal velocity, not necessarily the centreline speed. No assumption of inviscid flow or a uniform velocity profile is needed. If unequal amounts entered and left a fixed segment, its mass would accumulate, contradicting steady flow.
For a worked example, take horizontal water flow with stipulated mass density , inlet radius , outlet radius and inlet mean velocity . The circular areas give
The radius halves, the area falls to one quarter, and the mean velocity quadruples. The mass flow rate is . The same amount of water passes both sections each second; narrowing changes its speed rather than compressing it. The Reynolds number and Bernoulli's principle discussions use this same example to examine viscous effects and the additional assumptions needed to calculate pressure.
Figure 1.
Continuity fixes the mean speeds; Bernoulli's principle gives a conditional ideal pressure drop
. The pipe outline shows the radius ratio. Arrows represent section means, not a computed velocity field. The bars show the constant and the ideal exchange between pressure and kinetic energy density at equal height; is the arbitrary pressure reference. Details.
Incompressible stellar surface mode Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-06
An incompressible stellar surface mode has vanishing Lagrangian volume perturbation. In a harmonic fixed potential, a displacement generated by a solid spherical harmonic has a frequency fixed by its angular degree.
Before local expulsion, a linear star-formation law without return gives . If is the energy supplied per unit stellar mass, accumulated energy is . A fixed binding energy per unit remaining gas mass gives the threshold . This assumes a specified retained gravitational profile and neglects exchange between volumes.
Induced magnetic dipole Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
A small linearly magnetizable sample has a magnetic dipole moment induced by its applied field. In a fixed principal direction, write ; this convention gives units . A uniformly magnetized ellipsoid of volume has . The effective interaction potential energy at fixed source current is . The factor one half arises because the moment must be induced as the field is raised; differentiating as though it described a permanent moment would count the response twice. The response model excludes remanence, nonlinear saturation and hysteresis.
The induced worldvolume metric is the pullback of the target metric tensor by a brane embedding. For a nondegenerate timelike embedding, is its invariant worldvolume volume density. The specialization is the induced worldsheet metric.
Infrared regularization 2026-10-25
An infrared regulator suppresses the small-momentum region responsible for an infrared divergence. Examples are a small positive mass or a finite volume. It must be distinguished from an ultraviolet cutoff: setting external momenta and masses to zero to extract an ultraviolet divergence can introduce a spurious infrared divergence. Keep a positive auxiliary mass until the divergent local coefficients have been separated, then take the desired limit in infrared-safe quantities.
Differentiating the Euclidean classical equation for an instanton gives a zero eigenfunction proportional to its time derivative. Its norm satisfies , so replacing the Gaussian zero-mode integral by the center coordinate gives . The nonzero modes belong in the primed functional determinant. This removes the false divergence without deleting the center's integration volume.
For a steady state heat equation in a bounded region with zero outward heat flux, integration and the divergence theorem give the necessary compatibility condition
In particular, a strictly positive PDE source term throughout a region of positive volume makes a steady state impossible. The time-dependent conservation of energy law instead gives : stored thermal energy must grow. This is a compatibility condition on the total source, not a restriction requiring the source to vanish pointwise.
Intensive and extensive thermodynamic quantities Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
An extensive quantity measures how much of a thermodynamic system there is; an intensive quantity describes its state independently of that amount. The clean comparison is replication: take independent identical systems at the same thermodynamic equilibrium, with the same substance, composition and thermodynamic phase. Combining their accounting boundaries multiplies internal energy , entropy , volume , mass and amount of substance , while leaving temperature , pressure and chemical potential unchanged.[ref]
For copies the ledger is
An integer counts actual copies; a positive real describes the corresponding bulk scaling law. Copies can remain separated: replication need not involve removing a partition, changing a container or performing any work. Distinguish , the amount of substance measured in moles, from , the dimensionless count of specified entities, where is the Avogadro constant in . For example, contains specified entities; tripling it gives and entities. This uses the exact Avogadro constant , which does not triple. In the differential , is a molar chemical potential in ; the coefficient of instead has units of energy per entity.
Figure 1.
Replication multiplies the extensive ledger while preserving the equilibrium state
. Details.
As a direct check, the ideal gas law gives
For a monatomic ideal gas with only translational degrees of freedom active, internal energy of an ideal gas gives , so at unchanged temperature. Here is the molar gas constant. The scaling distinction lets a small sample supply an equation of state for a much larger amount: material state and inventory become separate questions.
Replication does not mean multiplying every linear dimension by : a geometrically similar container then has times the volume. Nor does it mean combining samples at different states. Equal temperature establishes thermal equilibrium but does not imply equal pressure, composition or mass density. Density of a composite system makes this distinction concrete.
Internal variable 2026-10-14
An internal variable records a material state beyond its instantaneous deformation gradient and temperature, such as a relaxing microstructural state. A constitutive equation specifies its evolution and its contribution to the free energy.
Interphase mass transfer 2026-10-31
The source is the mass gained by phase per mixture volume and time, through processes such as evaporation or condensation. Internal exchange conserves total mass, so its phase sources sum to zero. In an immiscible material-interface model without phase change, every is zero. The interface may still move: absence of transfer means that mass does not cross it relative to its own motion.