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RDF Terms

Physical Substance

An undifferentiated amount of physical material which, when subdivided, results in each part being indistinguishable in nature from the whole and from every other part.

An amount of water, penicillin, sand, or gold.

Negative example: the concept of gold.

An instance of this class has weight and takes up space. We mean the physical gold in a ring, not the concept of gold that shows up in the periodic table. The latter would be an instance of gist:KnowledgeConcept.

This concept generally corresponds to mass nouns in English. By contrast, instances of gist:PhysicalIdentifiableItem, such as a computer, book, or car, are count nouns. Physical identifiable items are made up of physical substances; e.g., a cake is made up of butter, flour, and sugar; a ring is made of gold. If you divide a physical substance such as an amount of water into parts, you have different amounts of water otherwise indistinguishable from one another; if you divide a physical identifiable item such as a computer into parts, each part will be distinguishable from the original whole.