I love how my phone is all like "it's 26°" and I get excited

@NerdyPotato It makes more sense in daily use. Celsius is to large or a gradient and solved a problem that never actually existed.

@MethDozer like boiling and freezing point at values that make sense? 🤔

Can you tell by feeling the difference between 32° and 35°

And what is the problem that never existed?

@MethDozer please explain how an average body temperature of 98, a freezing point of 32, a boiling point of 212 and comfortable temperatures between 68 and 82 make more sense than 37, 0, 100, 20 and 25.

@NerdyPotato because the gradients are smaller and more accurately portray felt temperature using whole numbers. It s a better range.

Smaller gradients are better gradients. Also, zero Celsius isn't even cold. 0 should be fucking cold. Acting like water freezing and boiling is this super important factor. When in truth it's just as arbitrary and irrelevant as anything else.

@MethDozer I agree that smaller steps are better, but you've got to agree that key points in the funny scale are completely random. You could at the very least have put average body temperature at 100 instead of 98. And Celsius often uses decimals when tiny differences are important like with body temperature to fix the lack of whole steps.

@NerdyPotato 100 was the original placement for body temp but it was measured incorrectly so it was adjust to 98.6 much later on.

Both scales are equal arbitrary.

@NerdyPotato

@MethDozer None of Centigrade (now called Celsius), Fahrenheit, Rankine and Kelvin were based on human body temperature, which is why that does not match any of those temperature scale closely.

Celsius is based on the properties of pure water. Kelvin is ºC in "size" but referred to Absolute Null instead, so is more appropriate for Physics and means none of its values are negative.

Although obsolete officially, commercially and technically, Fahrenheit lingers in common use in the USA and by many older people in the UK, simply by familiarity.

@ArishMell nobody said any scale is based on human body temperature. We all already know all this.
The only point is. both are equally arbitrary and Celsius solved a a problem that never existed.



We're really just kinda goofing off on an old yarn though. Americans vs. euros on everything hijinx

@MethDozer Fahrenheit was based on body temperature though.

@NerdyPotato I just don't know what the dude was trying to add or correct that was being said.

He always butts in with an aide tracked robot response

@NerdyPotato Seemingly strange things to choose but they may have a rational explanation.

Although the body temperature seems logical, that brine solution looks so arbitrary. Why not pure water's triple-point, as the Celsius scale uses, for 0º? And call the human body temperature 100 rather than 90 ºF?

Thnking about it, was Fahrenheit's null point the lowest temperature obtainable at the time? If so it makes sense. Early-18C Northern Europeans at least did not know lower temperatures do occur naturally in some parts of the world, let alone could they measure them. While anyone living in such cold regions did not worry about measurements anyway, only how to survive the cold!

Unless Fahrenheit's own documents survive to tell us his reasons, perhaps we'll never know for sure.

Despite being so bitter about science (while using the Internet...) Methdozer is right that scales of measurement are arbitrary, for they don't exist naturally. Yet it makes sense and simplifies everything for everyone, now to employ a universal temperature scale based on rational, readily-available reference-points that relate to ordinary life, and easy intervals. So the behaviour of pure water is the best going because water is so universal, simple and fundamental to both life and geographical processes.

(It does have that curious maximum-density point around 4ºC though - I think unique but utterly vital to aquatic life. If water behaved "normally", the lakes and seas would be solid ice with a thin layer of wet water on top.)

By a chance of arithmetic, -40ºF = -40ºC, but I think that is the only, or almost only, co-incidence between the scales.

@ArishMell the 0 point was using a common method to cool things down at that time. But sticking to it now when most people can't recreate that, makes very little sense other than habit.

@NerdyPotato Indeed, hence the move to using water.

I am not enamoured with some SI units for being a little too "coherent" for their own good (the Pascal is perhaps the worst), but the degree-Celsius is one of the most rational, practical and comprehensible of them.

@MethDozer What's the "Freedom t" scale? :-)