Tuesday, April 9All That Matters

Fahrenheit vs Celsius

by marianitten


Fahrenheit vs Celsius




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21 Comments

  • BackAlleySurgeon

    I love this guy. Although I think it’s kinda weird he tried to justify fahrenheit at all. Fahrenheit was created not cuz of vibes but because sea brine freezes at 0 on that scale and cuz 90 was close to what they thought human temperature was. It’s pretty damned nonsensical for modern use

    Reply
  • wisdom_and_frivolity

    Look rest of the world,

    You just adopt fahrenheit, but we call it Celsius because its easier to spell.

    Deal?

    Reply
  • IISuperSlothII

    Why in the Celsius argument is it always the boiling point of water not the freezing point? When its winter and I’m waking up to look at the temperature, seeing that minus tells me instantly I need to get out of bed 5 minutes earlier to defrost the car, that’s the biggest feature of Celsius.

    Anything else is just associating a feeling to a number, and even then that number never feels the same due to how many factors determine what the temperature actually is.

    Reply
  • aetius476

    This is the hill that I will always die on.

    When it comes to a temperature scale, there is a single property that is either objectively correct or incorrect, with the rest being mostly arbitrary conventions. That one property is: the location of zero.

    Fahrenheit gets it wrong. Celsius *also* gets its wrong.

    If temperature is a measure of the amount of heat in something, then a measure of 0 is only correct if it means zero heat. Any equation where T shows up (as opposed to ΔT), such as the Ideal Gas Law, the Stefan–Boltzmann Law, etc, will fail if T is in a scale that has an incorrect zero. Magnitude of degree is arbitrary, and can be adjusted for by adjusting the constants in those equations, but a wrong zero cannot be adjusted for without correcting the temperature scale itself.

    Therefore Kelvin and Rankine are correct, while Celsius and Fahrenheit are wrong.

    If you are arguing for Celsius or Fahrenheit based on anything other than subjective, arbitrary preference (I’m looking at you “freezing/boiling point of water is super duper sciencey”), then you’re a fool and you’re wasting both of our time.

    That said Fahrenheit holds a slight edge over Celsius because you can teach it to children living in places that have cold but not brutal winters, who are old enough to understand numbers, but not yet old enough to understand negative numbers. It’s a niche benefit, but it’s the only one either scale has over the other.

    edit: downvotes just mean I will add more things that your “scientifically correct” temperature scale is wrong about: Planck’s Law.

    edit 2: Carnot’s theorem

    Reply
  • jst3w

    I think we can come up with a compromise here. Call it the Celsiheit scale. Water freezes at 16* and boils at 156*. Everyone equally happy now?

    Reply
  • TildaTinker

    “In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade, which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.” – Josh Bazell

    Reply
  • AcceptablyPotato

    Celsius always seemed like the weakest of the metric measurements. Water freezes at 0° and boils at 100°*

    *At a very specific atmospheric pressure

    Live someplace high up like Denver or Mexico City and your water is boiling before it hits 100.

    Reply
  • bearsaysbueno

    One of the biggest benefits of Fahrenheit is that if you stick to whole numbers, Fahrenheit is a smaller and more precise unit, which actually lets you not be as precise. I can just say that it’s going to be in 70s or 80s. You can’t say it’s going to be in the 20s using Celsius. There’s just too much difference between 20C and 29C. It just makes Fahrenheit slightly easier to use in every day life.

    Of course you can just say high/mid/low 20s, but the point is that with Fahrenheit, it’s a smaller difference so you don’t need to, unless you want to be more precise.

    Reply
  • ReasonableAndSane

    Celsius is right, though.

    Actually it’s a pretty safe bet to assume that anything the Americans use is wrong and the opposite is right (see imperial vs metric system)

    Reply
  • Philias2

    So it looks like… let me just check here… *everyone* in the comments missed the point he’s making in the video.

    Reply

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