Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

500 results found

Archimedes' principle

(Encyclopedia)Archimedes' principle, principle that states that a body immersed in a fluid is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid. The principle applies to both floating and submerged bo...

Bernoulli's principle

(Encyclopedia)CE5 Bernoulli's principle Bernoulli's principle, physical principle formulated by Daniel Bernoulli that states that as the speed of a moving fluid (liquid or gas) increases, the pressure within th...

exclusion principle

(Encyclopedia)exclusion principle, physical principle enunciated by Wolfgang Pauli in 1925 stating that no two electrons in an atom can occupy the same energy state simultaneously. The energy states, or levels, in ...

complementarity principle

(Encyclopedia)complementarity principle, physical principle enunciated by Niels Bohr in 1928 stating that certain physical concepts are complementary. If two concepts are complementary, an experiment that clearly i...

Mach's principle

(Encyclopedia)Mach's principle mäks [key] [for E. Mach], assertion that the inertial effects of mass are not innate in a body, but arise from its relation to the totality of all other masses, i.e., to the universe...

correspondence principle

(Encyclopedia)correspondence principle, physical principle, enunciated by Niels Bohr in 1923, according to which the predictions of the quantum theory must correspond to the predictions of the classical theories of...

uncertainty principle

(Encyclopedia)uncertainty principle, physical principle, enunciated by Werner Heisenberg in 1927, that places an absolute, theoretical limit on the combined accuracy of certain pairs of simultaneous, related measur...

D'Alembert's principle

(Encyclopedia)D'Alembert's principle dălˈəmbârzˌ [key], in mechanics, principle permitting the reduction of a problem in dynamics to one in statics. This is accomplished by introducing a fictitious force equal...

Browse by Subject