By Star Trek Renegades, to wit:
This is because Fahrenheit is based on a brine scale and the human body. The scale is basically how cold does it have to be to freeze saltwater (zero Fahrenheit) to what temperature is the human body (100-ish Fahrenheit, although now we know that’s not exactly accurate). Fahrenheit was designed around humans. Celsius and Kelvin are designed around the natural world. Celsius is a scale based on water. Zero is when water freezes, 100 is when water boils. Kelvin uses the same scale as Celsius (one degree, as a unit, is the same between the two), but defines zero as absolute zero, which is basically the temperature at which atoms literally stop doing that spinning thing. Nothing can exist below zero Kelvin. It’s the bottom of the scale.
So.
Fahrenheit: what temperatures affect humans
Celsius: what temperatures affect water
Kelvin: what temperatures affect atoms
That’s actually a really nice summary…
Yours,
A nerd
Thanks for that
I appreciate it
However being able to remember and recall it as sensibly as that is highly unlikely
Yep, I always use Fahrenheit, The scale works better for the temperatures encountered in Ireland
A very popular table quiz question is “At what temperature are Celsius and Fahrenheit the same?” Answer -40.
(Most people say 0, but as you can see from the above summary, that is not correct).
Although something can’t get colder than absolute zero, you can still get on the Kelvin scale
* you can still get negative numbers on the Kelvin scale (edit due to linky shenanigans)
Having a temperature scale based on how water behaves isn’t such a bad idea when you consider humans are around 60% water anyway. In fact, basing your entire perception of temperature on the narrow scale of it in which humans exist is rather narrow-minded.
In any case, I think in celsius, as do my 60+ year old parents and never remember even being aware of fahrenheit growing up here. It’s definitely one of our more successful conversions to metric.
In fahrenheit 0 and 100 are just arbitrary numbers to use for “damn cold” and “damn hot” outside. 0 C is a pretty cold day (particularly by Irish standards), and 30 C is too damn hot. That’s good enough for me plus I can use the same scale to figure out how to cook things.
+1
Celsius works better for trying to figure out the weather, I find.
Very informative, I learnt something today :-)