Base unit (measurement) aspects of the world, such as time, distance, velocity, mass, temperature, energy, and weight, and "units" are used to describe their magnitude or quantity. Many of these quantities are related to each other by various physical laws, and as a result the units of a quantities can be generally be expressed as a product of powers of other units; for example, momentum is mass multiplied by velocity, while velocity is measured in distance divided by time. These relationships are discussed in dimensional analysis. Those that can be expressed in this fashion in terms of the base units are called .
Magnetic reconnection where formula_18 is the mass density of the plasma. Solving for the outflow velocity then gives where formula_20 is the Alfvén velocity. With the above relations, the dimensionless reconnection rate formula_21 can then be written in two forms, the first in terms of formula_22 using the result earlier derived from Ohm's law, the second in terms of formula_23 from the conservation of mass as Since the dimensionless Lundquist number formula_25 is given by the two different expressions of formula_21 are multiplied by each other and then square-rooted, giving a simple relation between the reconnection rate formula_21 and the Lundquist number