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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



... (Sec.123) of the wire to a middle binding-post, and carry the outside ends to the two outside binding-posts. In this way you can use either magnet alone, if desired (See experiments in text-book), or change the polarity at will by changing the connections. (See ...
— How Two Boys Made Their Own Electrical Apparatus • Thomas M. (Thomas Matthew) St. John

... not a helpless atom in this vast creation, with a fixed position, and naught to do but obey his own polarity. ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden

... and of making them perform the principal part of what, we must otherwise have wholly performed ourselves. In navigation is it possible to doubt that the powers of nature—the buoyancy of the water, the impulse of the wind, and the polarity of the magnet—contribute fully as much as the labours of the sailor to waft our ships from one hemisphere to another? In bleaching and fermentation the whole processes are carried on by natural agents. And it is to the effects ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey

... shivered in the shock of this sudden electric polarity. The man seemed alone against a sullen, unexplained hostility. The desperation she had thought to read but a moment before had vanished utterly, leaving in its place a scornful indifference and perhaps more than a trace of recklessness. He was ripe for an outbreak. She did not ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White

... 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 each Contraction,' is considered ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various

... the left hand, circulates through the body, and passes out at the right hand, that is to say, there is an indrawing at the left and a giving-out at the right, thus agreeing with Reichenbach's experiments on the polarity ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... and the sacrificial pile towered over a hundred feet in the cleared center area. Then, as the first collective Ah! arose, a giant slagger lumbered in from the east, the direction prescribed for such commencements. Long polarity arms glided smoothly out of the central mechanism and reached the length ...
— The Junkmakers • Albert R. Teichner

... When the grid no longer grows more positive but rather becomes less and less positive the current in the plate circuit decreases. As the grid becomes of zero voltage and then negative, that is as the grid "reverses its polarity," the plate current continues to decrease. When the grid stops growing more negative and starts to become less so, the plate current stops ...
— Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son • John Mills

... on the mathematical side. Now it is obvious that if gravitation is a form of magnetism—and if so it belongs to another plane of magnetic forces than that which we know and use—then the objects on a planet must have the opposite polarity from that of the planet itself. Since the globe is itself a magnet, with a positive and negative pole, its attraction power is not that of a magnet on any plane, because then the human race would be divided into ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby

... misconstrued as regarded its metaphysics], great would have been the service rendered to logic by Kant. But there is a greater. From this little brochure I am satisfied was derived originally the German regeneration of the Dynamic philosophy, its expansion through the idea of polarity, indifference, &c. Oh, Mr. Schlosser, you had not gepruft p. 5 of vol. ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey

... Oriental imagery here employed should not blind the reader to the precise scientific accuracy of the idea of which this imagery is the vehicle. Schopenhauer says: "Polarity, or the sundering of a force into two quantitively different and opposed activities striving after re-union,... is a fundamental type of almost all the phenomena of nature, from the magnet and the crystal to ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... could not show that the idea is no tenet of a philosophy, but a clear (though perhaps not clearly hurled on the canvas) illustration of universal justice—of God's perfect balances; a story of the analogy or better the identity of polarity and duality in Nature with that in morality. The essay is no more a doctrine than the law of gravitation is. If we would stop and attribute too much to genius, he shows us that "what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no one man's work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... bismuth, its apparently magnetic or diamagnetic properties being determined by the specific gravity of the neutral body as compared to that of the medium in which it is immersed. If the neutral body be lighter than the medium, it exhibits the magnetic induction of iron with respect to polarity, but is nevertheless repelled; while if it be heavier than the medium, its direction is similar to that of diamagnetic bodies such as bismuth, but on the other hand ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various

... conclusion[282] that a repulsive force, about twice as powerful as the attractive force of gravity, was concerned in the production of these remarkable effects. Nor did he hesitate to recur to the analogy of magnetic polarity, or to declare, still more emphatically than Olbers, "the emission of the tail to be a ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... of life breed fogs; and be moved, since you are scarcely under an obligation to hunt the meaning, in tolerance of some dithyrambic inebriety of narration (quiverings of the reverent pen) when we find ourselves entering the circle of a most magnetic polarity. Take it for not worse than accompanying choric flourishes, in accord with Mr. Victor Radnor and Mr. Simeon Fenellan at their sipping of the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... act opposite to its usual manner. I know this to be the case with gravity, for I have caused its positive and negative currents to alternate; that is, I have made it repel and then attract, and so on, at will, by changing the polarity of the body ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass

... supposed the interests of one Commander to be always antagonistic to those of the other, we have assumed a true POLARITY. We reserve a fuller explanation of this for another chapter, merely making the following ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz

... accompanies them all. We do not deny that. But it is obvious that thought being manifested in the presence of cerebral matter or something like it, is a very different thing from thought being a property of such matter, in the sense in which polarity is the property of a magnet, or ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell

... human bodies, symbolically called Adam and Eve. To these, for advantageous upward evolution, He transferred the souls or divine essence of two animals. {FN16-17} In Adam or man, reason predominated; in Eve or woman, feeling was ascendant. Thus was expressed the duality or polarity which underlies the phenomenal worlds. Reason and feeling remain in a heaven of cooperative joy so long as the human mind is not tricked by the serpentine energy ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... ground-trained mind, no matter how many years he may travel space. Then, of course, I realized that in the open void there is not top nor bottom; the illusion is supplied, in space ships, by the gravity pads. Somehow, the shock of impact had reversed the polarity of the leads to the pads, and they had become repulsion pads. That was why I had dropped from the ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various

... Reverse: This is caused by improperly connecting up batteries, which has reversed the polarity of the generator. This generally does no harm, since in most cases the batteries will automatically reverse the polarity of the generator. Generally the condition may be remedied by stopping the machine, reversing the batteries and starting the machine again. If this is unsuccessful ...
— The Automobile Storage Battery - Its Care And Repair • O. A. Witte

... altitude seemed to create a certain dead polarity between him and them. They lay sullenly outside his brain, repelled by this dead polarity, and he looked at them languidly, against the dim illumination of the window, with a dull joy that they could not come near him and enter the realm ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White

... by McDougall, is "an organized system of emotional dispositions centered about the idea of some object." The polarity of the sentiments is, however, one of its evident and striking characteristics. Love and hate, affection and dislike, attachment and aversion, self-esteem and humility have this character of polarity because each pair ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... by a sort of social repulsion—a sort of polarity which intensifies opposition and repugnance—the theory of slavery was carried to an extreme never before known in the history of mankind. Capital claimed to own labor, as the best relation in which the two could be placed toward each other. The masses of men, compelled to spend ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... Harmonics of Evolution we are told that at the very foundation of the manifestation of life lies the principle of polarity, which expresses itself in the duality and unity of positive and negative affinity. The swaying to and fro of the positive and the negative, the desire to balance incomplete polarity, constitutes the very ebb ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr

... had proposed the abolition of the Missouri Compromise, which since the year 1820 had been the bulwark of the new territories against the encroachments of slavery. The whole anti-slavery sentiment of the North was thereby intensified, and as the establishment of north polarity at one end of the magnet excites south polarity at the other, so Southern feeling in favor of slavery was thereby increased. Up to a recent period Southern leaders had, as a rule, deprecated slavery, and hoped for its abolition; now they as generally advocated it as good ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

... 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 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... I do what nearly all of the doctors do, who use electricity with any regard to polarity; that is, if treating acutely inflamed eyes, for example, apply the negative pole to the eyes, thinking thereby to make them more negative; or, if treating amaurosis, apply the positive electrode to the affected parts, thinking thereby to make them ...
— A Newly Discovered System of Electrical Medication • Daniel Clark

... Extension of the field-concept from the central to the peripheral field-type. Natural phenomena brought about by the suctional effect of the earth's levity-field. The different conditions of matter seen in the light of the levity-gravity polarity. Heat, the fourth state of matter. Procreation of physical substance - a natural fact. The case of Tillandsia. The problem of the trace-elements. Homeopathy, an example of the effect of dematerialized matter. The meteorological circuit of water. ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs

... current in it, and it feeds back to increase the magnetism until it reaches saturation. Then it starts to lose its magnetism and that feeds back a counter-emf which increases the demagnetizing current until it's saturated with opposite polarity. You get an alternating magnet, which doesn't evolve heat because of its magnetic instability, but absorbs heat trying to maintain its stability. This thing will absorb heat from anywhere—the air, water, sunlight or what have ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster

... the initial Polarity of Universal Spirit and Universal Substance, each being the complementary of the other, and out of this relation all subsequent evolution proceeds. Being complementary means that each supplies what is wanting in ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward

... person in the household who still obstinately refused to bow the knee to Ascott. Whether it was, as psychologists might explain, some instinctive polarity in their natures; or whether, having once conceived a prejudice, Elizabeth held on to it like grim death; still there was the same unspoken antagonism between them. The young fellow took little notice of her except to observe "that she hadn't grown any handsomer;' but Elizabeth watched him ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)

... grafts consisting of green growth of the year in perennials. Perhaps I might defeat natural processes by leaving a leaf or part of one at the distal part of a green graft shoot. This leaf might perhaps elaborate the necessary hormones or enzymes for wound repair purposes—and also for conducting polarity of sap movement toward maintenance of that scion ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association



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



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