I am not a native English speaker nor have I studied Physics in English before. I came across this word "Arbitrary" when I read a Mathematics for Physics book. I don't understand what it means. Here is the sentence "where $A$ and $B$ are arbitrary scalars."
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2It means that you can choose any scalars $A,B\in\mathbb R$ without any restrictions. – dinosaur Apr 30 '14 at 06:33
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Arbitrary means "undetermined; not assigned a specific value." For example, the statement $x+x=2x$ is true for arbitrary values of $x\in\mathbb R$, but the statement $x+x=2$ is not true for arbitrary values of $x$ (only for a specific value: $x=1$).
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4Think of arbitrary as meaning the same as any. So you get "where $A$ and $B$ are any scalars." – JRN Apr 30 '14 at 06:38