It is, but if you look at how Farenheit was conceived it’s absurdly nonsensical. 0°F is the freezing temperature or some mixture of chemicals, and 90°F is a guess at human body temperature lmao.
And the freezing/boiling points of water are arbitrary except in that they are used to actually define both scales. They provide easily measurable standards.
Deme@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Water is everywhere.
Cooking, weather, etc. You are also water.
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
Except that water boils at different temperatures when exposed to different amounts of pressure.
So this works pretty universally on earth… Near the ground/ocean level (plus or minus a few hundred meters). Once you get outside of that specific condition the numbers move.
So yes, fairly arbitrary.
Let’s all switch to Kelvin.
SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
The nice thing about celcius and kelvin is that they’re the same scale, but celcius is just shifted 273.15 units. And it’s more intuitive for humans to work with smaller numbers with bigger relative differences. But yes, kelvin would be a lot better to work with, especially considering stuff like doubling temperature (doubling energy) would actually work correctly in kelvin.
But if there’s one thing that makes a lot of sense to base temperature enough for human use, I would indeed say it’s water, because all life uses water, we are completely surrounded by it, and it’s super important to nearly everything we do too.
Deme@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Sure, but the vast majority of people live in low lying areas and even then it doesn’t shift that drastically. You need to climb a mountain to see the difference when it comes to applications of daily life.
Although now that I think about it. The same criticism applies to pretty much every definition of temperature that is based on the behaviour of matter. This also applies to Kelvin. Temperature is a property of matter and every type of matter behaves differently.
seth@lemmy.world 11 months ago
assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world 11 months ago
This touches on something important, which is that Celsius is based on an arbitrary pressure. It’s based on an elevation that suits the region which defined it.