Talk:Intensive quantity

Untitled discussion

I hope I'm not stepping on anyone's toes, but I removed a decent amount of the more "math-y" sections of this page. I feel the theorem/proof/corollary sections were tangential to the primary focus of the article, and they seemed hard to follow for a reader not already familiar with the concepts. I have attempted to include the important results of the previous sections within a new section entitled "properties", but they are now presented without mathematical justification. --AHM 21:46, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The page used to say "The reciprocal of an intensive quantity is also an intensive quantity". This is incredibly misleading and I've removed it. The thing is that you have to change what measure of "amount of substance" you use before the reciprocal behaves like an intensive quantity. Density is an intensive quantity with respect to volume, but inverse density is an intensive quantity with respect to mass. If someone can find a way to explain this in the entry they should do so. — ciphergoth 09:10, August 4, 2005 (UTC)

I agree that the proof sections were hard to follow, but for the opposite reasons. I think they were hard to follow because not enough justifications were presented for each step in the proof. I don't see anything wrong with them being presented in their own section (but they'll always be in the history for posterity anyway).--Paul 07:14, September 12, 2005 (UTC)

work is not extensive

I removed the paragraph about how pressure is intensive because its equal to work/volume and work and volume are extensive. Work is not extensive. It is not a state function, there is no F(etc) which gives work. PV is an extensive state function but it doesn't describe work. P dV is an infinitesimal amount of work done by a system, and the integral of P dV is the total work done by a system. Doubling the volume of a system does not double the work done by the system. A system does not contain a certain amount of work. Only an exact differential can be extensive, and work is not an exact differential. Well I guess I've run out of different ways to say it. PAR 07:43, 7 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

:)

equation for intensive function

I noticed that the equation for an intensive function on this page exactly matches the equation for an extensive function on the extensive quanity page, thus one is probably wrong.SnakeCasey 17:50, 22 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]