Talk:Scalar (physics)

One reason the lede of this article confuses people…
…is that it nearly (but not quite) defines scalar in terms of vector. If you don't know what a vector is, the lede of this article is going to be confusing. It's great that it gives examples of scalars (mass, distance, &c.), but poor that it doesn't also give examples of vectors, to help understand by comparison. Also, "speed" is a terrible example of a scalar, because it produces rampant confusion with velocity. Similarly, saying the magnitude of velocity is a scalar is probably important to the definition, but also confusing. It seems to me that speed should be removed from the list of examples (or barring that, speed and velocity should be defined and their definitions compared), and either addressed in its own section of the article, or simply omitted. I'm not sure how to handle the magnitude question, because of its likelihood of confusion. Perhaps to numerically express a vector numerically and compare it to its magnitude, textually? (p.s.: this talk page is…organizationally chaotic. Perhaps it needs…archiving?) jhawkinson (talk) 18:25, 27 May 2024 (UTC)


 * The talk page consisted of old discussions, mostly from the earliest days of Wikipedia, which were never archived; at that time conventions and tools were not yet established for making talk pages more organized. I just archived everything, as there are no recent discussions here (before this one). –jacobolus (t) 22:29, 27 May 2024 (UTC)