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Polarity   Listen
noun
Polarity  n.  
1.
(Physics) That quality or condition of a body in virtue of which it exhibits opposite, or contrasted, properties or powers, in opposite, or contrasted, parts or directions; or a condition giving rise to a contrast of properties corresponding to a contrast of positions, as, for example, attraction and repulsion in the opposite parts of a magnet, the dissimilar phenomena corresponding to the different sides of a polarized ray of light, etc.
2.
(Geom.) A property of the conic sections by virtue of which a given point determines a corresponding right line and a given right line determines a corresponding point. See Polar, n.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Polarity" Quotes from Famous Books



... dissembles majesty; extracts redeem polarity; causes hitherto exist. Ovations pursue wisdom, or warts inherit and condemn. Boston, botany, cakes, folony undertakes, but who shall allay? We fear not. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... produced great merchants and rulers, prime-ministers, viziers, nobles. We built castles in Spain (solid ones) and palaces in Venice. We have had saints and sinners, free livers and ascetics, martyrs and money-lenders. Polarity, Graetz calls the self-contradiction which runs through our history. I figure the Jew as the eldest-born of Time, touching the Creation and reaching forward into the future, the true blase of the Universe; the Wandering Jew who ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... discordant when it follows sensory impressions. The body is healthy when responsive to the direction of the spiritualized mind. It becomes diseased when it accepts the physical as its guide. One achieves mental ease and physical health through his mental polarity. If open to the physical and closed to the spiritual, discord will prevail. If open to the spiritual and closed to the physical, he lives the One Life, in mental ease and physical health. I open my mind to the inflow of the Spirit. I place my body under the control of my spiritualized mind. ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush

... tendencies, and their variations, by a theory of polarities,—polarities of the physiological unit between this theory of polarities and the Buddhist theory of tanha, the difference is much less striking than the resemblance. Karma or heredity, tanha or polarity, are inexplicable as to their ultimate nature: Buddhism and Science are here at one. The fact worthy of attention is that both recognize the same phenomena under ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... words without meaning. But are not philosophers themselves doing much the same thing, and merely restating facts which they profess to explain, when, like Mr. Lewes,[40] they talk of the 'specific shape' assumed by an 'organic plasma' being 'always dependent on the polarity of its molecules,' 'or due to the operation of immanent properties;' or declare that, in the process of organic evolution, 'each stage determines its successor,' 'consensus of the whole impressing a peculiar direction on the development of parts, and the law of Epigenesis ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton

... in this branch of his subject, he grows far too profound for our scientific apprehension. Giving him all credit for wishing to be clear, we confess to a sad mystification as to what he calls the 'Polarity of Light,' where a beam is described as 'revolving around poles peculiar to itself' and as producing 'beautiful spectres,' and we want new illumination from him as to his theory of colors. We agree to the statement that 'each object has a particular ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various

... he will behold the beatitudes of righteous living, and experience the joys which putting oneself in harmony with the order of the universe and the on-going of events never fails to bring. As a great scientist puts it, "Establish your polarity, young man, ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge

... of the organic. Behold its dreams in the fern and tree forms upon the window pane and upon the stone flagging of a winter morning! In the Brunonian movement of matter in solution, in crystallization, in chemical affinity, in polarity, in osmosis, in the growth of flint or chert nodules, in limestone formations—like seeking like—in these and in other activities, inert ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... apply with more exactness to the delicate prickly lettuce, our eastern compass plant. Not until 1895 did Professor J. C. Arthur discover that when the garden lettuce is allowed to flower, its stem leaves also exhibit polarity. The great lower leaves of the rosin-weed, which stand nearly vertical, with their faces to the east and west, and their edges to the north and south, have directed many a traveler, not from Acadia only, across the prairie until it has earned the titles pilot-weed, compass or polar plant. Various ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... with the stuff he found that it was not only highly magnetic, but also possessed polarity in a marked degree; and was entirely different from the true meteorite. Here was a curiosity, indeed; a small, insignificant and unattractive stone possessed of strong magnetic polarity, a property of electricity that ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk

... talk about in the way of scientific discovery at present, workers in science are not idle, and are steadily pursuing their investigations. Faraday has added another chapter to his 'Experimental Researches in Electricity;' Mr Grove has contributed somewhat to our knowledge of the 'Polarity of Gases;' a paper by Mr Wharton Jones, entitled 'Discovery that the Veins of the Bat's Wing (which are furnished with Valves) are endowed with Rythmical Contractility, and that the Onward Flow of Blood is accelerated by ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various



Words linked to "Polarity" :   negativeness, oppositeness, positiveness, negativity, sign, mutual opposition, polar



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