this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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Science Memes

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temperature (mander.xyz)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 42 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Celsius can be used in place of all three, the others cannot.

The freezing point of water is also a great place to zero the scale.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (1 children)

i love this idea that water is completely irrelevant to humans, as if it's not like 60% of our mass and vital to living

yeah no let's base the temperature scale around what some english dude felt was comfortable

[–] [email protected] -2 points 8 months ago

Yeah, like who needs to tell quickly whether road conditions will be icy? It's much more useful to know how much warmer it is than the arbitrary temperature Americans say is the lowest you can survive

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

I could be wrong on this, but I think Kelvin is basically required for thermodynamic measurements. Entropy measurements, for example, depend on ratios between temperatures relative to absolute zero. You could still manage using centigrade of course, but you would have to offset all of your temperature measurements by 273.15

Probably a lot of other physical applications that also depend on having an absolute zero reference, but that's the only one I can think of for now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The freezing point of water is also a great place to zero the scale

I disagree. Realistically the scale shouldn't be able to be negative at all. It doesn't really make any sense for something have a negative temperature.

Imagine if other scales worked that way. An object can't be negative centimeters long. Light can't be negative lumens. You can't score negative % on a test. If you are measuring something you can't have less than nothing.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

It's not nothing, it's just below the freezing point of water. Zero energy is zero Kelvin. This is also a bad take because Fahrenheit also goes negative. I suppose you should just start using Kelvin if that is your opinion.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Plus 100 is boiling it's a perfect scale.