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temperature (mander.xyz)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (137 children)

Nah, it doesn't make any sense, and isn't deep or insightful at all.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (80 children)

Let me explain. Anything below 0F is really cold for a human, and anything above 100F is really hot. The Fahrenheit scale was built around human biology.

0C isn't even that cold, and 100C is literally instant death. Thus, Celsius is less applicable to the human experience and more applicable to the physical properties of water. The typical range of human scale temperatures is like -10 to 40 degrees on the Celsius scale? Makes no sense.

Kelvin is the most scientifically objective scale, but also the least intuitive for humans, because absolute zero is completely outside our frame of reference.

So it's easily demonstrable that Fahrenheit is how people feel, Celsius is how water feels, and Kelvin is how molecules feel.

Be forewarned that I am willing to die on this hill, and any challenges to my position will result in increasingly large walls of text until you have conceded the point 😤

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (12 children)

I like watching people dying in this hill, more power to you. I don't necessarily agree, but telling people it's negative anything just to say it's pretty cold is indeed less intuitive to me (and kids don't even know negatives until a bit older).

Only thing is, 100 doesn't need to be anyone's scale, with C I think of it more like a scale from 10 to 40, especially since I live in California, and F is more a scale from 50 to 110. It'd probably help if F really was based on human temps, with 100 being the average temp whenever you measure, instead of 96 to 98.

(An aside, neither are ratio scales. 0 in both cases are arbitrary and a temp of 100 isn't twice as hot as 50. Only Kelvin is like that, which makes it my favorite even if it's never intuitive, haha)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

When I was a kid, I learned about negative numbers pretty early on. It was a perfectly normal part of life, since the temp was in the negative a lot of the year. Made sense to me. Temp is below zero? Water is solid. . Temp above zero? Water is liquid. Fahrenheit doesn't make much sense to me, inherently, because I don't have an integral frame of reference, built over decades of familiarity. Celcius on the other hand, it just makes sense!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Sure, negatives aren't hard, nor are decimals. But I should remind you we're talking about a population that wouldn't buy a third-pounder hamburger because they thought a quarter-pounder was more. Fractions are covered pretty early on, too!

Joking aside, if F actually was based on something specific and measurable, it'd also make sense. Then it's just a matter of what you got used to. Granted, human temps vary, so you can't just make 100 the human temp and 0 the temp a human dies, so that's an impossibity. (Water can vary too under circumstances if I remember right, but not quite as much or as unpredictable as some human based metric).

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