Are Speed and the Magnitude of Velocity the Same? “The person on the street” often uses the terms speed and velocity as if they are the same thing. By now you are probably familiar with the fact that in physics speed is a scalar quantity that has no direction associated with it while velocity is a vector quantity that tells what direction an object is moving. Since the magnitude of a vector is a scalar, can’t we just be a little more careful and say that the terms speed and magnitude of velocity are the same? The answer is not always.
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