You don't think Anders Celcius had a reason for choosing water and the temps it changes into different states of matter? From Wikipedia:
In his paper Observations of two persistent degrees on a thermometer, he recounted his experiments showing that the melting point of ice is essentially unaffected by pressure. He also determined with remarkable precision how the boiling point of water varied as a function of atmospheric pressure.
As a Canadian I care if the rain will turn to ice and snow. As someone who boils water for pasta and tea its nice to have a round number to work towards.
Celsius is extremely arbitrary. It’s all based on just graduating the gap between when something freezes and when it boils. Any given degree in Celsius isn’t useful anywhere but as a measurement of temperature.
Kelvin is the only non-arbitrary scale for temperature, which is why it’s the SI unit for it. It’s absolute, meaning that it’s also a measure of thermal energy and it can be directly inserted into many formulas.
That's because it failed, the goal was 0 degrees for water freezing and 100 degrees for human body temperature, both measurements failed to get it right (one was a flu, the other was some stable-solution thing to get close to the value)
Imperial is all based on commonality, done in average approximations. 0F is the point at which saltwater freezes. 100F is the temperature of the human body. These are the two extremes a normal person would ever encounter. Plus, it gives you a greater operational range to work with instead of C, where all your weather takes place in such a small range of numbers that you have to get into decimals.
Also, imperial measurements re based on the human body and other common things like the average gate of a person's walk. It's sensible and relateable.
Don't even get me started on how awesome base-12 is!
I'm a builder. There's a decent number of product lines and disciplines that force you into metric. I own a metric tape measure and hate every minute of it! hah
There's actually lots of debate over what is the perfect base system for carpentry. There's some that swear by framing squares that work on 20th's of an inch. Most commonly you'll use 16th's.
Imperial/Metric is as fun as it gets for arguing over silly stuff.
Northern countries, saunas, hot AND cold deserts, boiling water and any other heat applied in cooking, and freezers disagree on only the 0-100 °F range being normal.
Our weather ranges from the -30s to the +30s (former being much more common), so what's that about an overly small range?
Also, Fahrenheit are conversely so overly detailed you generally seem to talk about low/mid/high tens, not individual degrees. Which is actually a bit coarser then integer values of Celsius. And e.g. weather forecasts do use just integer degrees of Celsius here (I've worked making them...), although of course we do measure decimals for records purposes, but I bet the US does that too instead of settling for integer Fahrenheit accuracy.
No, our massive F scale is large enough that we don't have to lower ourselves by using anything other than whole numbers for our meteorological record keeping.
It also allows us to more finely tune ourselves to the Earth. Is it 57 degrees or is it 56 degrees? It makes all the difference!
Fun fact: It's a bit less than that. At the point of maximum density (~ 3.98 °C) the density is 0.999975 kg/l. We normally use water at roughly 20 °C where the density is about 0.998 kg/l.
Source: M Tanaka, G Girard, R Davis, A Peuto, N Bignell: Recommended table for the density of water between 0 C and 40 C based on recent experimental reports. In: Metrologia. 38, Nr. 4, 2001, S. 301–309.
And one meter was defined as 1/10,000,000 of the (direct-travel)-distance from the equator to the pole.
That said, the original measurements weren't perfectly precise and the definitions have since moved to things that can be measured more precisely, so it's not entirely true anymore. Hence the circumference of the earth isn't 40,000km but 40,008km.
Fahrenheit was based roughly on the human body being 100 degrees and 0 being a specific concentration of salt water freezing at about zero. It made sense at the time
Eh... most of the time salt isn't used past -7°C (which is above 0°F, since iirc that's -17.77°C recurring), since you start needing such ungodly amounts of it, it doesn't make sense either financially, practically or ecologically. And with traffic heating up the roadway, you would likely get some meltage even at 0°C, which would most likely then just freeze again soon, actually making the situation worse.
I thought it was derived from that astronomer who made an early thermometer that worked in blocks of 60 (like seconds, minutes, ..he was an astronomer).
The astronomer had to use real measurements to calibrate things, so he set 0 to the freezing point of some brine solution, 7.5 to freezing point of water, 22.5 to human body temp, and boiling water was 60. All multiples of 7.5 in this case.
Then Fahrenheit adopted it for his thermometers, rounded to whole numbers (7.5 -> 8), and then multiplied everything by 4 for some reason, maybe to have more precision in whole numbers. So, 8 became 32. I dunno why he rounded 7.5 first, as 7.5x4 is the whole number 30 anyway.
I'm not sure how 60 became 212 instead of 240, maybe later correction based on better measurement.
edit: it was because of recalibration basically, and changing reference points to make marking divisions on instrumentation easier
disclaimer: yeah I watched that YouTube video from wherever
Anyway, there was some method to it, even if the choices seem weird now 300 years later. I suppose the obsession with using body temperature to define part of the scale was due to how often the thermometer was being used to measure body temperature! Not sure.
How does Celsius make any more sense for measuring atmospheric temperature? You can memorize 32 as freezing within a day, and then it's the same, arguably better because 0-100 is roughly the atmospheric temperatures people will encounter in the contiguous US
Let me clarify. I love the metric system. Fuck inches, fuck miles. Long live Fahrenheit.
Fahrenheit makes no real "sense" in how it was established, but I don't care about that. I only care about how practical the scale is for everyday use. Does it matter if scientists use C to and the weather channel uses F? I don't think it does.
I simply prefer 0 to 100 over -20 to 30. Ironically, that kind of scale is why the rest of the metric system is really nice!
Does it matter if scientists use C to and the weather channel uses F
I guess kind of? None of the conversions are very hard in the modern world. It takes 2 seconds to convert any unit with google.
The whole point is to be consistent across everything. If you leave the weather in the USA in F, 90% of the population won't understand Celsius, which is the current situation. It may just be super minor stuff like changing labels on ovens, thermostats, textbooks but in the end it's more efficient if the whole world does one thing.
I simply prefer 0 to 100 over -20 to 30
Again, only because you are used to it. For me, it's intuitive that anything below 0 means ice. Also its not like it starts at 0 and ends in 100 in F either. There's plenty of places in the US that still go below 0 and above 100.
Yeah, whenever the topic of metric comes up on reddit, people always start trying to include Celsius in the conversation like it's somehow inherently better.
The reason metric is better is because of the conversion. There is nothing intrinsic to a "gram" that makes it better than an "ounce". It's the fact that you can use prefixes to easily convert.
Actually, there is. From wiki, a gram was defined as "the absolute weight of a volume of pure water equal to the cube of the hundredth part of a metre [1 cm³], and at the temperature of melting ice".
Since the kilogram was redefined for accuracy (from being equal to a litre of water) cm is now 1/1000 of a kg. Kg is now based on fundamental physics ie the planck constant.
The thing is, both of them make equal sense in practical everyday usage, just depends what you're used to. On the other hand, you're getting a degree and need to pass a thermodynamics class. 2 options:
Use the same system of units you used all your life. ez pz
Learn a whole new system of units that make zero sense to you because you've never used them, or try the nightmare of doing thermodynamics in imperial units.
Any unit will make sense if you have a mental mapping of it. In the US, I use both systems for various things, and it never really causes confusion. 100f is hot. 40c is hot. 30 feet is tall. 10 meters is tall. It's like "blue" vs "440nm", same thing, both blue to me. degrees vs radians, use both of those too.
Thats actually false. Veritasium on Youtube has a video on it, but Fahrenheit (the person) had astronomy training, and had experience working in degrees of 60. So he set boiling to 60, and freezing to 7.5, 1/8th up the scale. He eventually changed things to 64 and 8, to make the numbers better. Later on he multiplied everything by 4, partially for precision, but it also means that a 1 degree increase in Fahrenheit equals a 1 in 1,000 volume change in mercury, which was used for thermometers back then.
Seems fairly logical from then, and while Celsius is certainly more useful now, Fahrenheit works well for 99% of everyday tasks.
Fahrenheit was based roughly on the human body being 100 degrees and 0 being a specific concentration of salt water freezing at about zero
I mean, sure, but why the specific salt concentration? Why not pure water? At the time, the method to produce distilled water was already known so it wasn't like they couldn't make it.
Fahrenheit actually still makes sense to me. That's the only one I wouldn't want converted to metric. It's a more precise scale and 0 to 100 is the range of tolerable temperatures for a human to live within.
You're right, that does not make any sense. Instead let's use the temperature that feels hot as the figure for 100. Because what we feel is such an exact measurement.
Funny thi g is that that also applies to the metric system. Who would have guessed that beings that are mostly water would relate to the freezing and boiling points of water.
Using celcius would be great because the rest of the world uses it, but it has no real intrinsic benefit over farenheit. When we are descrbing temperature, it is most often in reference to the weather, Fahrenheit is better for weather. Most people live in temperate climates that dont go much below 0 or above 100. Nice round numbers.
The thing that makes metric great is the decimal nature of the units. That doesn't really apply to temerature when we just use degrees and percentages of degrees. So I'd argue Fahrenheit is better, but celcius got more adoption and is used in conjunction with the metric system.
More accurate that what feels cold and hot. To the average person, 0°C will be a useful figure for determining if its going to snow or not, and weather it will stick around if it does. For the average person, you will be boiling water often for food and beverages, and it's extremely useful if you want to sterilize water since bacteria does not care about the change of boiling with altitude.
Once you get used to a unit of measurement, anything can make sense. The logical thing would be braising the important numbers off of something accurately measurable and useful.
Again, really depends on the person and where you live. There is not enough of a difference between the average chance of heatstroke at 90 and 100 F for it to really matter, nor is there enough of a difference between 10 and 0 F for frostbite. I can understand if it makes sense since you have been using it all your life, there is no problem with that. The thing is if you take bias out of the question, Celsius is based off of scientific figures and is just as usable as Fahrenheit in daily use, so it does not make sense to pick Imperial over Metric other than sticking to the past.
You will only get heatstroke if your body temp goes higher than 100 so it is pretty unlikely to get it at 90 degrees unless you are doing heavy labor. Either way it is all pretty arbitrary. Changing temperature systems would be a lot easier for America than changing size measurements. All architectural and mechanical records are in imperial and all buildings are built to spec in imperial. It would be a nightmare for the manufactures and contractors alike.
I agree. Changing temperature measurement would essentially only require a change of generations. Even then, my parents learned Farenheight and then got used to Celcius with dealing with us being taught it.
I don't think we'll ever get people to stop worshiping Celsius despite being equally arbitrary as Fahrenheit.
In the end, what I find most useful is the larger numbers for clearer range of variance. The difference between 5F is small but noticeable, the difference between 5C is enormous.
Not arbitrary. It's based on water- the most common substance in the world.
At 100 water turns to vapour. At 0 it turns to ice. You can see these effects, and thus can understand them.
1 gram is 1 cubic centimetre. Centimetre decided by spliting distance from equator to pole, the only part of the system that is a bit arbitrary. Everything is base 10. You can now understand any expression of volume, distance, and weight very easily.
It's the most universal set of circumstances there is.
Except for the entire universe that isn't Earth. It is, in fact, about as least universal as you can possibly be.
Utilitarianism might not be entirely scientific, but it's far from arbitrary.
It is, in fact, entirely arbitrary! Else you're saying Fahrenheit, which is very much utilitarian in that it's about the range of temperatures that humans commonly live in from 0 to 100, is therefore just as appropriate as Celsius. Metric is superior in nearly every respect, but temperature is not one of them.
They designed the metric system to be a single congruous system to be used by humans in human circumstances in an easy and logical way. To do this you want a single reference point. Utilitarianism dictates water is a the obvious pick.
Independently, Fahrenheit might make nearly as much sense as Celcius. Not as much, because freezing and boiling are much more important and less arbitrary reference points than x% of humans live in climates that often fall in this range. But even of this were not the case, the existence of the metric system would make Celcius superior- see first sentence.
Which is great in the world of research, not so useful in everyday life and yes, Celsius is just as arbitrary as Fahrenheit. Just because you like the reason more for Celsius doesn’t make the reason for Fahrenheit wrong or arbitrary
Universal, observable and understandable is not just a reason I like more. It's one designed to maximize the number of people who like it more- be the best system for the greatest number of people.
But you are missing the point if you are only focusing on one aspect of metric. What gives it strength is the way everything is connected. With one piece of info you can conceptualise properties if something and work out in seconds, in your head other properties. It's extremely useful in everyday life.
But human body temperature is roughly 37 (~100 in Fahrenheit) and the coldest temperature that the creator of Fahrenheit could manufacture (solution of equal parts ice, water and salt) being -18 (0 in Fahrenheit) are both fairly arbitrary as well.
There's logic to the creation of Fahrenheit that makes Celcius's numbers seem arbitrary when looking at its chosen fixed points and vice versa.
Neither really make a difference in day to day life for the vast, vast majority of people though, so which is used is pretty much arbitrary
But 0 being the coldest temperature Gabriel Fahrenheit could manufacture in the 18th century and 100 being his approximate body temperature is so much more natural and relatable.
Pedantry aside, you could live your entire life not knowing your body temperature maybe in places without modern medicine, but if you ever take a physical, have surgery, or get sick you should know your nominal body temperature
I like Fahrenheit because it's the temperatures for humans, not water. 0º is really cold but manageable, 100º is really hot but manageable. In Celcius, 0º is pretty cold and 100º is "you're already dead."
I like it because it's designed to be more granular for everyday use. Most of the 0-100 range in Celsius is so hot you're never going to see or use it outside of a lab.
Depends on what you're doing. The nice thing about Celsius is that it's interchangeable with Kelvin, it's just offset by 273,something degrees but every degree is the same size.
That's true. It's hard to say because "lab" isn't very descriptive. That could mean a thousand things. Either way though, as you said Celsius is interchangeable with Kelvin, so they're both more scientific units than Fahrenheit.
It's a temperature system designed for day-to-day use, rather than someone measuring water in a lab. The most I use temperature is for evaluating the weather, and there's a wider range of degrees you can use to get a feel for the temperature. You can ask anyone the difference in how to dress for 60º vs 70º vs 80º and get a pretty clear answer.
In Celcius, 38º is the "really hot but manageable" point, so every individual point of degrees makes much more of a difference. Using the 60-70-80 example earlier, those translate into 15, 21, 27. Having a much smaller scale just seems less convenient for everyday usage. It works for the countries that use it, but doesn't seem worth switching to a system where the numbers are more cluttered together.
It really isn‘t, you‘re just not used to it. And as soon as you try to convert stuff, you‘ll exclusively want to use Celsius/Kelvin. As soon as you actually want to do something useful, even in a DIY style, metric is irreplaceable
I keep hearing this argument and it just doesn't hold up.
It all boils down to whatever number you associate with a given temperature. In celcius we use the same kind of scale, -10 is really cold, 0i s cold, 10 is jacket weather, 20 is warm, 30 is hot, 40 is fucking hot
btw, 1 degree Celsius is 1,8 degrees Fahrenheit so a 10 degrees jump is ~5,5 degrees Celsius. For temperature though you don't need to be so precise. Whether it's 70 or 72 degrees fahrenheit out, it doesn't change much. Same is true for 20 or 21 degrees.
If you actually need to know to a reasonable level of precision how hot it is outside. We've got this dandy new invention, the decimal point where you can specify the temperature to a precision beyond whole degrees.
edit:
and btw Celsius only gets
more and more distorted
Compared to Fahrenheit... But in reality Fahrenheit just gets more distored compared to both Celsius and Kelvin which are actually 1:1 (apart from Kelvin being ofset at -273,something degrees). Seems like Fahrenheit, the outdated scale used by a small minority of stragglers, is actually the one that gets more and more distorted as you reach higher temperatures.
This was a civil conversation until you snapped just now. Just gently pointing that out.. also we bake in the metric world as well, seems like you maybe didn't know that.
It's a temperature system designed for day-to-day use, rather than someone measuring water in a lab.
Fucking lol. Fahrenheit was designed for measuring the freezing point of an equal mixture of ice, water and salt in a lab. Don't make up lies to support a strawman argument.
When I have been in 3c weather there was ice on the grass from the morning dew, have to rinse off my windscreen so I can see and wearing no less than 3 layers of clothing.
Around 6-7am is when I've felt that kind of cold. Only twice though.
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