4.2 Physical constants

Many mathematical and physical constants are pre-defined in Pyxplot. A complete list of these can be found Chapter 14. Some of these, for example, e, pi and goldenRatio are standard mathematical constants which are accessible in the user’s default namespace:

pyxplot> print pi
3.1415927

Others, such as physical constants, are of more specialist interest and are defined in modules. For example, the speed of light is defined in the physics module phy:

pyxplot> print phy.c
299792.46 km/s

Most of the pre-defined physical constants, such as this one, make use of Pyxplot’s native ability to keep track of the physical units of quantities and to convert them between different unit systems – for example, between inches and centimeters. This will be explained in more detail in Section 4.6.

To list all of the functions and variables defined in a module such as phy, type

print phy

or simply

phy