Physical Model

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online.Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! A physical model (most commonly referred to simply as a model, however in this sense it is distinguished from a conceptual model) is a smaller or larger physical copy of an object. The object being modelled may be small (for example, an atom) or large (for example, the Solar System). The geometry of the model and the object it represents are often similar in the sense that one is a rescaling of the other; in such cases the scale is an important characteristic. However, in many cases the similarity is only approximate or even intentionally distorted. Sometimes the distortion is systematic with e.g. a fixed scale horizontally and a larger fixed scale vertically when modelling topography of a large area (as opposed to a model of a smaller mountain region, which may well use the same scale horizontally and vertically, and show the true slopes).