this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 253 points 1 week ago (4 children)

30°C is 303 Kelvin. Half of that is 151 Kelvin, which translates into a fairly mild -122°C!

Takes out hockey stick

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 week ago (6 children)

New strategy to prevent global warming: just freeze all of the CO2 out of the air!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

mmm, delicious carbonjack

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Aka a cool 272 Rankine for our US folks.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Wait, does it? Are joules in thermal energy per kelvin a purely linear relationship?

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[–] [email protected] 66 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

Granted. Celsius now range from 0 to 50

Edit: ... or whatever unit you prefer. It's still the same

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Oh, it's way better than the alternative interpretation.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

30°C is 303.15K, half 151.575K is a nice and chilly -121.575°C lower than any recorded temp on earth by about 21°C. When working with monkeys paw or genies always declare your units and reference frames.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (4 children)
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[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 week ago

Reminds me of a time one of my friends was happy that it was going to warm up and said something like "it's going to be twice as warm tomorrow". It was going from maybe 20F to 40F or something.

That led to an interesting discussion.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 week ago (5 children)

This knowledge comes in handy with marketing BS around CPU coolers. If an aftermarket cooler gets a CPU to 35C when the stock cooler is at 70C, marketing will sometimes claim it cut temperatures in half.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (11 children)

I mean.... that's literally half though

edit: I am not a science man and I am in over my head in this argument

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago

But it's not.

Celsius and Faernheit are interval scales, not rational scales. The absolute change from one number to the next is consistent, but since you can go into the negatives, 1 is not double 2.

Kelvin and Rankine are rational because they use an absolute zero.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If you convert those temperatures to Kelvin, they become 308K and 343K. Since Kelvin is absolute and we're measuring the same material, this tells you how much more thermal energy is there and their actual proportion to each other.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

thanks, this makes a lot more sense.

That being said, 70C down to 35C is a huge difference, relative to the temperature ranges we live in

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

308.15K is not half of 343.15K

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 week ago (18 children)

I use this as an example for interval vs ratio; you can't halve Celsius because it's an interval scale where zero is arbitrary. Kelvin is ratio as it has an absolute zero-- you very much can halve it and doom near the entire planet next summer

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Obviously we'd all die but I wonder how exactly. This would make a good question for Randall Munroe.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (3 children)

A good genie would instantly invent a metric of "number of degrees in excess of room temperature"

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think it's fairly well known that there are no good genies. But otherwise, true.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (3 children)

For a present, I think it would be fun to have a contract lawyer draft up an ironclad 3 wishes contract

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I was kind of thinking along the same lines. But to be truly ironclad, would you need a genie lawyer? Like not a lawyer who specialized in Genie Law, but an actual genie?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is why I hire my attorneys from Avernus. Don't nobody got lawyers like Hell has lawyers. If you're trying to pull one over on a genie, you're going to need either devils or fae. And the devils are more likely to respect their contract, including any loopholes you manage to find in it.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

what, you never heard of the room temperature room?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

The indoor temperature is always at room temperature and vice versa. It's not constant though.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Is the temperature scale directly proportional to the heat energy? I think the amount of energy needed to raise water by 1 degree is the same no matter the starting temperature for example. Is 100°K double the heat energy of 50°K?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Kelvin doesn’t have degrees btw you just say 50K or 100K because it’s an absolute temperature scale as opposed to an arbitrary or relative one like Fahrenheit or Celsius. I’d expect that the energy would be double though that’s more of a feeling.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Well at some point you encounter a phase change, which complicates things, but mostly the heat capacity (how much energy it takes to raise the temperature) is fairly constant. In an ideal gas it is exactly constant, but that is a bit of an approximation, even if it works quite well for most gases.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

That wish just condenses the atmosphere of half of the planet for half of the time. How do you like your puddles of liquid oxygen now?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Could someone please explain?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Let's say the summer average is 30⁰C or 303.15 Kelvin

The absolute coldest possible temperature is -273.15⁰C, or 0K.

Halfway between absolute zero and 30⁰C/303.15K is somewhere around -121⁰C/152K

So if it were half as hot in the summer, it would be colder than ever recorded on earth.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (10 children)

In short, you don't want to use a temperature scale with an arbitrary starting point for doing calculations like this. The freezing point of water is no more or less arbitrary than the freezing point of oxygen or sodium or anything else. It's just one that's somewhat useful for everyday use. When handling calculations for multiplying temperature, you want an absolute scale like Kelvin.

Or Rankine if you're that kind of pervert.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What makes Kelvin absolute, and why is Celsius "wobbly"?

I failed physics in high school

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

0 K is like when there is 0 heat basically, while celsius isn't. Imagine a unit for distance called "goob" where 0 goobs is 100 m and 1 goob is 115 m. In that case the goob unit would behave differently than a meter when you multiply and divide because 0 of the units don't actually correspond to "nothing" in a physical sense. That's exactly how the Celsius scale is, with zero being placed somewhere arbitrarily, not at a physical zero.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

i feel like i need more goob in my life. do you sell rulers?

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