Heat capacity system. When expressing the same phenomenon as an intensive property, the heat capacity is divided by the amount of substance, mass, or volume, thus the quantity is independent of the size or extent of the sample. The molar heat capacity is the heat capacity per unit amount (SI unit: mole) of a pure substance, and the specific heat capacity, often called simply specific heat, is the heat capacity per unit mass of a material. Nonetheless some authors use the term specific heat to refer to the ratio of the specific heat capacity of a substance at any given temperature to
Defining equation (physics) of measurements to be made when they might appear ambiguous and unclear otherwise. A basic example is mass density. It is not clear how compare how much matter constitutes a variety of substances given only their masses or only their volumes. Given both for each substance, the mass "m" per unit volume "V", or mass density "ρ" provides a meaningful comparison between the substances, since for each, a fixed amount of volume will correspond to an amount of mass depending on the substance. To illustrate this; if two substances A and B have masses "m" and "m" respectively, occupying volumes