How to Use scalar in a Sentence

scalar

adjective
  • To tide you over, here are Henry's latest videos about our favorite scalar boson.
    — Sean Carroll, Discover Magazine, 12 July 2012
  • Set things up just right and at large spatial scales, the scalar field interacts only with itself and acts like dark matter.
    — Adrian Cho, Science | AAAS, 20 Nov. 2020
  • Aristotelian excellence is scalar.
    — Joshua Rothman, New Yorker, 22 May 2026
  • For him, the visibility of scalar changes gave him and his colleagues a sustained sense of hope and urgency.
    — B. R. Cohen, Longreads, 13 Jan. 2026
  • Song, meanwhile, hopes to look into basic questions about scalar curvature that are not motivated by physics.
    — Steve Nadis, Quanta Magazine, 30 Nov. 2023
  • Sipper talked about how her company trains with scalar field outputs of simulation data, and the meshes of objects.
    — John Werner, Forbes.com, 23 May 2026
  • Since this is a scalar equation, the gravitational force will be negative, meaning downward movement.
    — Rhett Allain, Wired, 15 Oct. 2021
  • To get students thinking about that scalar dynamic, my colleague and I asked them to walk the streets to get a feel for the terrain, the tree canopy, the elevations.
    — B. R. Cohen, Longreads, 13 Jan. 2026
  • This instability, which is the hallmark of spontaneous scalarization, is expected to endow the black hole with scalar hair.
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 14 Dec. 2020
  • If scalar particles interact strongly with nucleons, neutron stars today should be far colder than what telescopes detect.
    — Rupendra Brahambhatt, Interesting Engineering, 6 Dec. 2025
  • So assuming the respective number of degrees of freedom for each scalar, matter, and force field in the Standard Model, how many does that make?
    — Quanta Magazine, 15 June 2026
  • Any scenario in which scalar-nucleon particles interact strongly with protons and neutrons would have cooled these stars far more than what telescopes actually see.
    — Rupendra Brahambhatt, Interesting Engineering, 6 Dec. 2025
  • Its slow movement, in C minor, is built on a mesmerizing cello ostinato, rising by scalar steps from C to F and then back down.
    — Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 29 Aug. 2022
  • One of Linde’s ideas is that in the early universe, scalar field energy should be constantly created at various magnitudes due to quantum effects.
    — Alan Lightman, The Atlantic, 8 Feb. 2021
  • One set of theories is known as Tensor-vector-scalar gravity (TeVeS), which adds an extra field to gravity.
    — Jesse Emspak, Smithsonian, 1 Nov. 2017
  • Artworks from the past, the recent past, and the present reverberate and scratch against each other with material and scalar heterogeneity, talking at, with, and beyond themselves.
    — Horace D. Ballard, Artforum, 22 Apr. 2026
  • This has extremely important implications for what the r-ratio (the tensor-to-scalar ratio) of the gravitational waves produced by inflation would be.
    — Big Think, 22 Oct. 2025
  • If hypothetical scalar particles interact with nucleons, neutron stars would be perfect factories for them.
    — Rupendra Brahambhatt, Interesting Engineering, 6 Dec. 2025
  • Dark energy, either described by the cosmological constant or a quintessence scalar field, only started acting in the universe about 8 billion years ago.
    — Robert Lea, Popular Mechanics, 23 Jan. 2023
  • Other elementary particles—those that researchers don’t believe can be divided any further—include six flavors of leptons and the Higgs, known as a scalar boson.
    — Jason Daley, Smithsonian, 19 June 2018
  • Around a spinning black hole, rotational energy would be transferred to light scalar dark matter, amplifying its density, almost like a paddle churning cream into butter.
    — Robert Lea, Space.com, 15 May 2026
  • Their analysis shows that the scalar–nucleon coupling must be weaker than about 𝑔𝑁≲5×10−14 — the strongest limit ever achieved for this class of particles.
    — Rupendra Brahambhatt, Interesting Engineering, 6 Dec. 2025
  • The vulnerability assessment was based on the view that environmental action would take scalar coordination.
    — B. R. Cohen, Longreads, 13 Jan. 2026
  • Hopelessness comes from the scalar mismatch between we individuals, who are wee individuals, and the problems of an 8,000-mile-diameter earth.
    — B. R. Cohen, Longreads, 13 Jan. 2026
  • These modifications of general relativity also introduce a scalar field.
    — Katia Moskvitch, WIRED, 6 May 2018
  • The scalar field would have braided itself into the gravitational field in a way that exerted negative pressure on the universe, reversing the contraction and driving space-time apart —without destabilizing everything.
    — Quanta Magazine, 31 Jan. 2018
  • SiFive’s approach, however, which pairs efficient scalar/vector compute with flexible accelerator control interfaces, is a unique proposition.
    — Marco Chiappetta, Forbes.com, 8 Sep. 2025
  • In today’s heterogeneous world of Domain-Specific Processors, parallel processing of large data sets is a critical adjunct to scalar processing.
    — Karl Freund, Forbes, 8 Aug. 2022
  • And the measurements of the scalar spectral index, plus the limits on primordial gravitational waves, favor certain models of inflation (like slow-roll, single-field models) while disfavoring others (like hybrid inflation and large-field models).
    — Big Think, 14 Oct. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'scalar.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: