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Physics LibreTexts

48: Conservation Laws

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There are four conserved quantities in classical physics:

  • Energy
  • Linear momentum
  • Angular momentum
  • Electric charge

Two of these (energy and electric charge) are scalar quantities; the other two (linear momentum and angular momentum) are vector quantities.

We've seen the first three of these quantities in this course. You'll meet the fourth — conservation of electric charge — in General Physics II.

In addition to these four, there are a few more esoteric conservation laws related to particle physics; but these conservation laws are beyond the scope of this course.


48: Conservation Laws is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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