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The properties of an object are inferred by learning and reasoning based on the information perceived. Abstractly, an object is a construction of our mind consistent with the information provided by our senses, using Occam's razor. In common usage an object is the material inside the boundary of an object, in three-dimensional space.
A material is a substance or mixture of substances that constitutes an object.Materials can be pure or impure, living or non-living matter. Materials can be classified on the basis of their physical and chemical properties, or on their geological origin or biological function.
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.
A definition of "matter" based on its physical and chemical structure is: matter is made up of atoms. [17] Such atomic matter is also sometimes termed ordinary matter . As an example, deoxyribonucleic acid molecules (DNA) are matter under this definition because they are made of atoms.
The scholarly analysis of material culture, which can include both human made and natural or altered objects, is called material culture studies. [6] It is an interdisciplinary field and methodology that tells of the relationships between people and their things: the making, history, preservation and interpretation of objects. [ 7 ]
A structure is an arrangement and organization of interrelated elements in a material object or system, or the object or system so organized. [1] Material structures include man-made objects such as buildings and machines and natural objects such as biological organisms, minerals and chemicals.
An intensive property does not depend on the size or extent of the system, nor on the amount of matter in the object, while an extensive property shows an additive relationship. These classifications are in general only valid in cases when smaller subdivisions of the sample do not interact in some physical or chemical process when combined.
Peter Van Inwagen maintains that all material objects are mereological simples with the exception of biological life such that the only composite objects are living things. Van Inwagen's view can be formulated like this: "Necessarily, for any non-overlapping xs, there is an object composed of the xs if either (i) the activities of the xs ...