Pedantry:
K and °R agree on 0
K and °C agree on the unit difference
°F and °R agree on the unit difference
°R and °Ra are the exact same thing (??)Celsius and Fahrenheit agree on -40, but since they’re scales that scale at different rates there’s bound to be some value where they intersect rather than some meaningful number like Kelvin and Rankine being zeroed to Absolute Zero
Two lines which are not perpendicular will meet at one point?
Also Rankine, being an absolute scale, theoretically shouldn’t be in ° anything, and it’s only some weird historical quirk that is the reason it usually is called degrees.
I am not sure I follow that. The scale is always relative right? It’s just the zero that’s absolute. But that’s also the case with measuring angles where we do use the degree symbol.
It’s just the zero that’s absolute
Right, that’s what makes Rankine and Kelvin absolute scales, while Fahrenheit and Celsius are relative.
deleted by creator
This screenshot is a little bit hard to see, but from what I can tell:
°RA is pointing at °R and °C
°C is pointing at K and °F
K is pointing at °R and at °F
°R is pointing at °F (and the other gun isn’t aimed at anyone in particular)
°F is pointing at K and at °CEmphasis disproves your claims, sadly. Perhaps there was another way to label them to make it fit, but that’s not what was done here.
°R and °Ra are the exact same thing (??)
I think °R is supposed to be Réaumur
Imagine if some distance measuring system decided their zero was at like 10 feet.
Let me just shorten this down 8 feet
welds on an extra 2 feet
If using log scale, 0 is at -∞
no 0 would be at 1
I mean, the temperature can be -1. But nothing measures negative.
Imagine if it did though.
Rankine and Kelvin have zero at the same point, which is absolute zero, and should not be used with the degree symbol
This concludes my TED talk
According to Wikipedia Rankine is properly used with the degree symbol, but sometimes is not by analogy with Kelvin.
Gross
I absolutely agree! Both should get degrees, because that would make temperatures finally make sense!
(I am aware that the degree symbol has something or other to do about not being absolute yada yada yada 😅)
I went down a huge rabbit hole cause of this. I personally like °F over °C but agree it’s arbitrary. So I tried to make a scale that started at the coldest air temp on earth (some day in Antarctica) and went to the hottest day on earth (some day in death valley) and put the coldest day at 0°A and the hottest at 100°A.
Sadly this made a scale that was less precise than I’d like. I like that I can feel the difference between 73°F and 74°F and don’t want to have to use decimals.
So maybe the end points could be only places where people actually live. Well it looks like some people live in Russia around -70°C and some people live in northern Africa around 50°C so if you just take °C and add 60 you can get a -10 to 110 scale where most temps would fall between 0 and 100. Still has the unit difference of °C (which I don’t like) but I like that most temps are between 0 and 100. I also don’t really like negative temperature since it seems wonky.
To “fix” the unit scale you could just multiply everything by 2 so the difference between each full degree is half as much. So temps would be between -20 and 220. °A = 2(°C + 60) °A = 2(°C) + 120
And it turns out I (basically) created the Fahrenheit scale but moved. °F= 1.8(°C) + 32
TL;DR: I’m stupid and this was fun but also a waste of time lol
Celsius is tied to points of ice melting and water vaporising. Since water is very important for the life on our planet, it makes even more sense than arbitrary chosen meters or seconds.
At sea level. Welcome to La Paz, where the triple point is made up and the freezing point doesn’t matter!
And similarly, Fahrenheit seems to be tied to the internal temperature of the human body, with 100 degrees being the maximum that the average person can handle before their organs start to be damaged.
Yes, Fahrenheit is about humans, and Celsius is about the element that makes life possible. The latter is more generic.
Maximum is 100 °F and minimum is 95 °F. Those seem pretty arbitrary to me
But not everybody experiences temperature the same, so using a system based on what ‘humans’ like, seems a bit useless
It’s not about what humans “like,” it’s about the human bodies’ internal operating temperature and using that as a reference point, the same way that Celsius is about the states of matter of water . Fahrenheit is useful in medicine for that reason, while Celsius is useful anytime a comparison to water is helpful, and beyond that, it’s really just whatever you grew up with. Using a system based on what water “likes” is equally as useless unless you grew up using it as your reference point for temperature in your daily life. Neither 75 Fahrenheit or 23.8889 Celsius tell me whether or not I’m going to need a jacket today unless I’ve already experienced said temperature and use that scale in my daily life.
deleted by creator
does you scale change as Earth warms?
Add a scale revision for each year to the meme
Never heard about °R and °RA before this meme
It’s the Rankine. Some Scottish dude wanted to use Kelvin without using Kelvin. It’s basically the Fahrenheit scale but with 0˚R set at absolute zero.
0˚R = 0Kand1˚R = 0K + 1˚FFrom what I can gather, R and Ra are the same thing?
They are. The post could swap one of them out for Re or Rø instead and it would work, though
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Réaumur_scale
so, they meant °r probably
https://byjus.com/physics/unit-of-temperature/
I had to look out up too!
Now look into °De. It’s upside down!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delisle_scale
Why would you do this to me?
Celsius tried to fit too much into 100 notches to please big math.
F is more nuanced with more notches, but the ends aren’t logical. It coukd be shifted perhaps, but how?
If freezing was moved to 0, then water boiling would be 180
Perhaps C could have had a 200 degree range, then it would be closer to F and not so hard to convert.
But also: Scientists are important and we shouldn’t make it too easy, it demeans their work. Maybe make the C scale show water boiling at 183.4521 degrees so scientific calculations are more impressive-looking and respectable.
and not so hard to convert
“Please change the entire world’s system to make it easier for the one country that uses a different one”
deleted by creator
Celsius is literally just Kelvin but shifted… So it’s just as friendly for “universal math”.
deleted by creator
K is just shifted °C though and just removes what’s nice about it with freezing/boiling of watee while requiring 3 digit numbers for every temperature you’d encounter in daily life. I think I’d rather use Fahrenheit
It wouldn’t even change the difficulty, really. You’d just wind up multiplying or dividing by 9/10 instead of 9/5.
America moving zero to Celcius’ zero would be better, it would remove one whole step from the calculation
Then if they made their degrees about 9 fifths the size (they could get higher resolution than they’d lose by doing what we do and quoting temperature to one decimal place where needed) it would be dead simple to convert (just change the symbol from °F to °C!)
The SI unit scales are chosen to fit together to avoid “respectable” scientific calculations.
To heat one milliliter (1 ml) of water one degree Celsius (1 °C) you need one calorie (1 cal) of energy.
Also the dimensions of one milliliter, is one cubic centimeter (1 cm^3), and that amount of water weighs 1 gram (1 g).
Thus 1 liter of water needs 1 kcal of energy to heat up 1 °C.
I’m aware, taught that in school.
Also aware of the real world, those things don’t mesh the same at altitude.
In theory, reality and theory are the same. In reality, they’re not.
I love science when it’s not treated like a religion.
It’s not limited to 100 steps. The decimal system gives you infinite granularity.
then it would be closer to F and not so hard to convert.
So few countries use Fahrenheit that this shouldn’t even be a consideration
0 lbs/lg = Absense of weight.
0 inches/centimeters = Absence of size.
0 Kelvin = Absence of heat.
If something is 0lbs, 0 inches and 0 Kelvin: does it even exist? 🤔
0lbs is absence of weight, 0kg is absence of mass. Terrestrials, smdh…
When avoirdupois pounds and pounds-force are used together I’m pretty sure it’s more common to use ‘lb’ for avoirdupois pounds and ‘lbf’ for pounds-force.
I mean, I think a neutrino is close to that.
But what if they mutate?!
Neutrinos are an elementary part of the universe, they can’t mutate.
You’re confusing them with Latinos.
It’s a joke from this dude
And I finished the joke… Skip to the end with Jimmy mistry.
what the fuck is lg, using TVs as a unit of weight?
This is more like if you measured altitude by counting from sea level vs the center of the earth vs the top of Mount Everest or something
Vs low tide vs high tide vs tidal average…
I think there are 4 different “tallest mountains on earth” depending on if you are measuring from sea level, how you are measuring sea level, or if you are measuring from the base and the mountain and how you are defining the base of the mountain.
This is why Celsius is the only SI unit that isn’t just wholly better than its imperial counterpart. Both F and C are fairly arbitrary, but in my view F has the slight edge by giving numbers 0-100 in most weather conditions across earth.
Kelvin is the SI unit. Anyway also for the weather Celsius is clearer: Below 0 = snow, above 0 = rain. And Celsius at least has fixed points that can be recreated - if all thermometers and data on scales were lost we could easily recreate °C, but not °F.
Ah well I should have said metric measurement then. It is part of the metric system, yes?
If you can’t remember the number 32 then I guess. Personally I think it’s pretty bizarre to have negative temperatures all the time but whatever floats your boat.
Regarding losing all thermometers and data… if you lost the definition of Celsius there would be no way to recreate it. This seems maybe more likely then your scenario.
No seriously what is significant about 0F? I live in a place that sees a lot of negative F too.
It’s so arbitrary. If it was 0 at freezing water and 100 at human body temp I’d understand it but no, it’s literally nothing significant in people’s lives. It has no tangible anchor.
It’s purely emotion keeping it around.
0°F is the coldest night Mister Fahrenheit has ever witnessed, thinking it couldn’t become any colder than this.
100°F is Mister Fahrenheit’s slightly feverish body temperature.
???
PS: Pretty much all other countries also had their own measurement systems and simply switched to metric because it made sense. I’m glad we did, and that pretty much all others did too.
PPS: I’d also be up for revamping time measurement, why can’t we have 10h a day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute? 100.000 seconds in total per day, currently we have 86.400 so a second would only become slightly shorter.
The French tried to implement that in the First Republic, together with 12 months à 30 days per year, 3 weeks à 10 days per month and 5 (6) extra days at the end of the year to make it work (from Christmas to New Year, how thematic!)
It failed because the French were fearing they’d have to work more (if they’d also only have 2 days off per 10d instead of per 7d). One of the biggest tragedies in French history. Without the week reform the time reform might’ve succeeded.
Nothing. It’s equally arbitrary as setting 0 to be the freezing point of water.
But it covers the weather for the vast majority of people, the vast majority of time, better than Celsius does. That’s what I mean.
If you want to remove sentimentality from your temperature then use Kelvin but Celsius is just as arbitrary and sentimental as Fahrenheit is.
0 as the freezing point of water isn’t arbitrary though, and neither is boiling.
They’re both very useful reference points since water is universally available and you can easily tell when it freezes and boils, it makes it comparatively trivial and accessible to create your own thermometer which is likely to at least generally agree with someone else’s.
this is the one aspect where i kind of prefer imperial measurements for distance, basing measurements on the human body means everyone has easy access to a reference that is likely to be not too tremendously wrong.
Obviously not super relevant these days, but back in the day it was a pretty neat feature. Like fuck, it wasn’t that long ago that the meter and the kilogram were still defined by a SINGLE specific object kept in a climate controlled vault.
Yep Celsius is 1-100 for water and Fahrenheit is 1-100 for humans
I’ve always hated this justification of Fahrenheit. For it to be a good argument, 50 °F would need to be the ideal comfortable temperature. But instead 50 is really fucking cold. 100 just isn’t as hot as 0 is cold.
I think it depends on the person which is the problem, for me 50 isn’t that cold but 100 is completely unbearable
Yeah, 50 F is chilly.
PSI 0 100 ┣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┫ Dead Potentially survivable Vs Atm 0 100 ┣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┫ Dead Dead Vs kPa 0 100 ┣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┫ Dead Totally FineSee that Celsius graph is precisely the nonsense I’m trying to point out. 0 ℃ isn’t “fairly cold outside”. It’s literally the definition of freezing cold. 0 ℉ is “dead” if you’re not wearing quite heavy clothing. 0 ℃ is “really cold outside” and still understating things.
0 ℃ isn’t “fairly cold outside”. It’s literally the definition of freezing cold.
…for water. At 1 atmosphere of pressure. Not taking into account salinity.
0 ℉ is “dead” if you’re not wearing quite heavy clothing.
Lots of temperatures on both ends of the spectrum are “dead” without proper attire, regardless of what unit of measurement is used.
0 ℃ is “really cold outside” and still understating things.
I think there’s a bit of a reference frame issue here.
Zero C is normal winter temperature for a lot of people. For some, it’s downright balmy. If it’s sunny, I won’t need more than a fleece and jeans. Working outside, I’ll probably ditch the sleeves after a while.
Going off of your instance, I’m guessing you’re in Australia. Since I don’t know where, I grabbed a large southern city (Melbourne), and looked up the record holder for coldest temperature (Charlotte Pass). All temps in Celsius:
Melbourne:
Charlotte Pass:
For comparison, here’s a city near me (New York), and a random town I picked from a map in northern Minnesota (known for being cold in the winter).
New York:
Roseau:
That… is a stark difference. Where you live makes a huge impact on what feels “normal.” 0 C is no big deal here. It’s just “cold.” Minnesota in January? “What a nice day!” That’s not nonsense, it’s different perspectives.
Is Fahrenheit arbitrary and outdated? Yes. Is Celsius arbitrary? Also yes. There’s nothing special about the freezing and boiling points of water at 1atm. But that’s the (basis behind the) current scientific standard. Is it ridiculous that the US still uses Fahrenheit? Yes. Why? I don’t run the place, I just live here.
Does any of this matter in the day to day of normal people? No. Will people keep arguing about it? Absolutely.
Fully agree with you. How does that make sense:
Really hot summer days (30°C) are 86°F
Usual summer days (25°C) are 77°F
Room temperature is ~70°F
Spring / autumn days (20°C) are 68°F
Chilly outside / late autumn / early spring days (~10°C) are 50°F
Cool outside / warm winter days (~0°C) are 32°F
Cold outside / usual winter days (-10°C) are ~15°F
Winter nights (bit below -20°C) are ~ -10°F
Fahrenheit users keep saying how strange it is to have negative temperatures when using °C, but it’s just the same in Fahrenheit except the whole scale makes less sense since it’s using fully arbitrary, not recreatable points for 0 and 100.
I mean, I deliberately avoided using terms like “hot summer days” and “usual winter day” because that’s far more dependent on where you are. Where I am it’s:
- Really hot summer days (35 ℃)
- Usual summer days (30 ℃)
- Room temperature (24 ℃)
- Spring / autumn days (25 ℃)
- Chilly outside (18 ℃)
- Cold outside / usual winter days (15 ℃)
- Winter nights (10 ℃)
So I used words that are about the experience of a person in those temperatures in comfortable light clothing, rather than times of year. And obviously there’s some subjectivity there, with some people being more comfortable in cold temperatures than others. But still, we’re talking about the comfortable mid point varying from mid 20s to high 10s. There’s no reasonable world in which 50 ℉ (10 ℃) is the midpoint.
Yes, it doesn’t matter which example you take, Fahrenheit never makes sense imo.
Fahrenheit is 1-100 for humans
Only if you grow up with it lol. Fahrenheit makes no sense to me
how is fahrenheit 1-100 for humans? 100 i can sorta see, most people have a body temp around ~37°C (though still, there’s about 1°C of variance…), but 0°F is very very cold and not exactly a temperature that many people encounter on a daily basis.
i certainly cannot think of anything more relevant to humans than the freezing and boiling points of water, most people encounter them often and it’s very easy to see when water starts freezing or boiling.
If you see ice outside you know the temp is below 0°C, when the water in your pot is boiling you know it’s at 100°C, it’s super fucking easy.But the reference points for fahrenheit cannot intuitively be measured, 0°F has no obvious indicator, and 100°F can at best be vaguely inferred based on the air temps we can do work in, and even then you can really only reliably infer something like 30°C because that’s generally when humans start feeling like it’s too warm to do significant amounts of labour.
But R and K agree on zero
Rankine isn’t pointing a gun at Kelvin because of this, but Kelvin is pointing one at Rankine because Rankine is an abomination that should not be
Meanwhile, Pi and the Fine Structure Constant watching the show, passing each other the popcorn.
The best part about the fine structure constant is that it is not related to any other thing. It just is.
It’s a magic number that just emerges in physics.
And it is not constant.
Even though it is.
Dimensionless numbers, not dependent on any mere mortal, subjective arbitrary unit of measurement like length (meters or yards or cubits - same difference) or time.
Whether you are on Earth or a planet in Andromeda or a billion light-years away, if you study subatomic structure you WILL bump into the fraction 1/137. Just like you will in geometry with 3.1416.
At least Kelvin and Rankine agree on the zero, soooo…
I have long since given up on an ideal world where there are universally used standard units. Now I embrace unit chaos. I want my equations to contain fucked up units that are harder to decipher than just doing the calc again. It’s how I artistically express myself.
