this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
559 points (75.5% liked)

Science Memes

11161 readers
1977 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]
559
temperature (mander.xyz)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
378 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 43 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Celsius can be used in place of all three, the others cannot.

The freezing point of water is also a great place to zero the scale.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (1 children)

i love this idea that water is completely irrelevant to humans, as if it's not like 60% of our mass and vital to living

yeah no let's base the temperature scale around what some english dude felt was comfortable

[–] [email protected] -2 points 8 months ago

Yeah, like who needs to tell quickly whether road conditions will be icy? It's much more useful to know how much warmer it is than the arbitrary temperature Americans say is the lowest you can survive

[–] namingthingsiseasy 5 points 8 months ago

I could be wrong on this, but I think Kelvin is basically required for thermodynamic measurements. Entropy measurements, for example, depend on ratios between temperatures relative to absolute zero. You could still manage using centigrade of course, but you would have to offset all of your temperature measurements by 273.15

Probably a lot of other physical applications that also depend on having an absolute zero reference, but that's the only one I can think of for now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The freezing point of water is also a great place to zero the scale

I disagree. Realistically the scale shouldn't be able to be negative at all. It doesn't really make any sense for something have a negative temperature.

Imagine if other scales worked that way. An object can't be negative centimeters long. Light can't be negative lumens. You can't score negative % on a test. If you are measuring something you can't have less than nothing.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

It's not nothing, it's just below the freezing point of water. Zero energy is zero Kelvin. This is also a bad take because Fahrenheit also goes negative. I suppose you should just start using Kelvin if that is your opinion.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Plus 100 is boiling it's a perfect scale.