this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
766 points (95.0% liked)

Science Memes

11205 readers
2117 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
766
Fahrenheit vs. Celsius vs. Kelvin (i.imgur.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
158 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Zero Fahrenheit is the freezing point of brine (of a certain concentration). That's water chemistry.

Originally, 90F was based on the average human body temperature, but that later changed to 96F, which just goes to show how arbitrary that scale is.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's all arbitrary. Someone just decided to base a scale off of something and that something isn't fixed from the start. The meter used to be based off the measurement of the earth, but now it's based off of light.

It's just some random semi-useful starting point that we all agree on so we're using the same language.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

The meter did not change, science has merely defined it more precisely and reliably over time. It is a measure of length, still one 40 millionth of the circumference of the earth through the poles. Other definitions like the speed of light definition will give you the same result. These newer definitions have reduced uncertainty and added ways to reproduce its length by natural means. But it's not like the 'original' meter was shorter or longer than today's meter, at least not by any noticeable margin.

Shifting the top end of a temperature scale by over five percent of the scale is a bit more arbitrary than that.