Sunday, September 18, 2016

Scalars vs. vectors

With the help of this discussion, I have finally realized the difference, why you cannot call any 1-dimentional vector a scalar. You can only do so for numbers since you can add and multiply any numbers. You can also add the cats but you can multiply them only by numbers. Mutiplying them with cats or dogs brings cats into another cat or cat-dog (vector) space. The cats are not additive to such "scaled" vectors. Therefore 1 can be either scalar or vector but 1 meter can only be a vector.

So, this definition

A scalar quantity is a one dimensional measurement of a quantity, like temperature, or weight.  A vector has more than one number associated with it.   A simple example is velocity.  

must be wrong. It assumes that you can scale something with the measured temperature if strip the degrees off. But, it does not make any sense.

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