London-based photographer Greg White explores physics’s abstract and fundamental laws in his series Base Quantities. Creative photography techniques are used in his endeavor to illustrate the seven fundamental quantities. Inspired by the work of Berenice Abbott, whose science-documenting images provided a more thorough grasp of the otherwise complex realm of physics, the photos were created.
Length
Length is a measure of distance. In the International System of Quantities, length is a quantity with dimension distance. Length is commonly understood to mean the most extended dimension of a fixed object. However, this is not always the case and may depend on the object’s position.
Amount of Substance
The amount of substance measures the size of an ensemble of elementary entities, like a collection of atoms, molecules, or other particles.
Time
Time is the indefinite continued progress of existence and events that occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future.
Temperature
Thermodynamic temperature is defined by the third law of thermodynamics, in which the theoretically lowest temperature is the zero point. At this point, absolute zero, the particle constituents of matter have minimal motion and can become no colder.
Mass
Mass is both a property of a physical body and a measure of its resistance to acceleration (a change in its state of motion) when a net force is applied. An object’s mass also determines the strength of its gravitational attraction to other bodies.
Electric Current
An electric current is a flow of electric charge in a circuit. More specifically, the electric current is the rate of charge flow past a given point in an electric circuit.
Luminous Intensity
Luminous intensity measures the wavelength-weighted power emitted by a light source in a particular direction per unit of solid angle, based on the luminosity function, a standardized model of the human eye’s sensitivity.
