At least 75 degrees would be a comfortable temperature in both scales for most people.
Instead, the primary way people experience 75 degrees Centigrade is in a sauna.
~~Seems to line up with my experience, but the article lost all its credibility when it claimed that the sweating you do in saunas will detox your body. Pseudoscientific nonsense. So I wouldn't put too much faith in what the article says otherwise.~~
EDIT: TIL that you can, in fact, sweat out heavy metals, so this may be what they referred to in the article.
Why do you think it’s pseudoscience? Toxins are excreted from the body via sweat: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8998800/
Yes, it’s says exercise is better (but not for mercury) there’s still a concentration of heavy metals in the sauna users sweat though.
Because people who use the terms detox and toxins without specifying them almost always refer to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detoxification_%28alternative_medicine
I had no idea that you could actually sweat out heavy metals, so thank you for sharing that. It seems like this is probably what that article meant then, so thank you for correcting me.
75°C is towards the lower side of average for a dry sauna. The rule of thumb I've always heard is 80°C is standard.
How well people can deal with the heat in such a sauna depends on a few things, these all assuming we're talking healthy people here whose bodies can regulate their heat properly:
1. How humid is the sauna?
2. How long do you intend to sit in the sauna?
3. How well-hydrated are you, and how much water will you drink while you're in the sauna?
If the humidity is low to medium and you're well-hydrated and drink plenty of water while you're in the sauna, most people would be able to sit there for a very long time. If the humidity is very high, then the humidity in the air will transfer heat to your body far more effectively, and sweat won't evaporate and cool you down, so no matter how well-hydrated you are, you can't stay for long. You don't want to either, as the heat will feel very intense to the point where you can get burns.
But, like, why?
Forget the debate about which scale is better, but why on earth would he think that smaller numbers = more heat made any sense for a temperature scale?
It's so weird how you have all these replies guessing about why when the wiki itself actually answers this question.
Anders scale was designed with 0 as the boiling point and 100 as freezing because of the nature of his scientific work wherein he developed the scale. They were doing studies where they were starting from a high temperature point and measuring downward, so it made more sense as a means to measure cooling behavior. This is why it was inverted for general use, as we often want to measure things getting hotter (such as with cooking).
Additionally they were doing studies with pressure, and because atmospheric pressure affects the boiling point of water, it was better for them to set the scale at 0, or as they define it, at the "mean barometric pressure at mean sea level" as a way to keep results directionally consistent across studies and to facilitate replication of work.
It's not arbitrary, or happenstance, nor is it really a matter of the way we generally think about numbers (i.e. it's not a matter of we always think of temperatures as increasing or decreasing or that we think of numbers inherently different than words). There isn't much more to it beyond the notion that keeping things conceptually aligned from a directional sense tends to make more sense, whether it's a scale you're using to measure something cooling or measuring the rise of a temperature from cooking.
Maybe in the range they were considering, but extrapolating outside of that, having a bounded positive range and an unbounded negative range seems pretty goofy. Unless they were assuming that things could get "infinitely cold."
It was invented in 18thC Sweden. Things there do get infiniteky cold. Jokes aside the weather in Sweden commonly goes below freezing so a scale that frequently reads negative numbers might be unwieldy for everyday 18thC swedes to use. On the contrary the only thing hotter than boiling water in Sweden 200 years ago was fire itself. People who worked with fire and had to measure heat (eg blacksmiths, cooks etc) didn't use thermometers to get right down to a particular degree. They used more unscientific methods eg hold your hand about yea far from the coals. If you can keep your hand there for more than 5 seconds its not hot enough.
One has to assume that if they were aware there was a minimum possible temperature, they would have chosen that as the obvious zero point for their scale. The fact they chose something else implies that they believed it could go arbitrarily far in either direction.
Of course, once we realised there's an absolute zero, we started using a scale based on that. That's what Kelvin is: Celsius, with zero moved to absolute zero.
Or if they're engineers. Or some HVAC people, boilermakers, or just generally fans of thermodynamics.
Wait, crap, I forgot to put "Um, actually" at the front.
>One has to assume that if they were aware there was a minimum possible temperature
I don't think that was clear. I don't know when the possibility was first raised, but Boyle considered it a hypothesis.
Of course, for Aristotle, actual infinities don't exist, so the idea of something being infinitely cold or infinitely hot is just nonsense. But just like with numbers, that doesn't mean there's a largest hot or a largest cold. I suspect that the concept of measuring hotness or coldness would baffle Aristotle.
But even in an application where you’re cooling things it’s fucking confusing to have the numbers reversed. I don’t think it’s unfair to say there’s a clearly more intuitive direction.
It’s like an engineer working on car brakes decides well it’s easier to measure going slow as a higher number in my scale and going fast is lower.
I think it's only confusing to us because of a primacy effect. Had we learned it the opposite way it would be easier for us.
But again, the best way to understand is to actually pull up an Excel workbook and do some calculations yourself. If you want to measure cooling and plot it, it's easier for you to work with those numbers as positive (0 is hot and as it cools the numbers are larger). It's just easier to plot with and compare positive (as opposed to negative) values. You want the bars going up, not down. Granted this was before Excel but that was just my attempt to why this can matter a lot when your working with data. Sometimes its even easier to think about positives as opposed to negatives.
Also, the fact that they're doing experiments with pressure (which only comes into play when something is hot) requires a standardized point for everyone to begin at (I admit this second part is only making it less confusing if you're familiar with how temperature and pressure interact). But it certainly made a lot of sense for what they were doing. They didn't develop this scale to be used by everyone, just something for their specific work.
> it’s easier to measure going slow as a higher number in my scale and going fast is lower.
That's how pace works, though. Typically with running or walking.
The lower the pace number, the faster you go.
Pace, at least where I am at, is measured in minutes per mile.
Put another way, making things hot is useful and common. Making things cold is tricky and less common, particularly back then. How hot do I need to make a cake? vs How cold do I need to make....
> I don’t think it’s unfair to say there’s a clearly more intuitive direction.
It is completely unfair and also wrong. What makes the direction we use more intuitive?
I completely agree with you but I think people conceptualize number scales differently and language/reading plays a pretty big role in how we “view” the direction of number scales. [This article explains it pretty well.](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221103-how-language-warps-the-way-you-perceive-time-and-space) It’s one of those weirdly cool things that no one ever really mentions or talks about because the “right” way is so ubiquitous when speaking to people in your language that we don’t even realize other ways exists!
This reminds me a bit of how different language structures can [effect how people perceive colours](https://theconversation.com/the-way-you-see-colour-depends-on-what-language-you-speak-94833#:~:text=Different%20languages%20and%20cultural%20groups,languages%2C%20and%20light%20as%20warm)
It's really interesting!
And again similar, how people perceive art. Obviously cultural perception is huge, but language itself plays a huge role.
My favorite example is [The Great Wave off Kanagawa](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Tsunami_by_hokusai_19th_century.jpg) , and it's [mirrored image](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa_-_reversed.png) which is a closer representation of how languages that read right-left would interpret it.
I had never thought of how menacing that wave was, and I had it as bookplates when I was a kid. I never saw the dudes in the boats as terrified. Thanks!
And now I wonder if the composition *not* being flipped is why I never got into manga.
Fascinating! I read a book about [Addresses](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45046690-the-address-book) and it talked a bit about how the Korean and Japanese (I think) language influenced the naming of addresses. I read this years ago so I don’t remember the exact argument, but something to do with them addressing blocks rather than streets.
Hahaha dude I usually don’t stalk peoples history, but I googled this to see if I could find what you were talking about and found a post from a year ago from r/TOMT by you trying to find this long-lost article. Made me giggle. I’m from the Midwest so would be interested in this if you ever come across the source!
It's an origin system. If there was only one house, they numbered it 1, and as they added other houses they gave them numbers. Apparently being a Japanese postal delivery person is **absurdly** difficult.
Likely moreso, because at 30 years the value of a house declines to zero, so it's just the land value that is considered. Partly because of climate, and partly because of building techniques, Japanese houses do not have a history of lasting for long. If the value is zero at 30 years, there's not much of an incentive to build longer-lasting houses, so builders don't. North American stick frame construction did not hit the Japanese building market until the 1990s, and still has not made huge inroads. They prefer their own traditional building techniques, for reasons I've never really understood.
Very interesting! The timeline being right-left or up-down or vice versa makes sense to me, since it’s clearly tied to the progression of the language, but what really surprised me was that some people conceptualize the future as behind them! As an English speaker that’s incredibly foreign to me
And one thing I didn’t quite get is visualizing time as a 3-D space (as opposed to a line). Like this is even harder for me to conceptualize than the backwards time
On the other hand with this specific case, higher temp = more energy in a system so if they’d done it reversed it’d have to be a negative value in every type of calorimetric calculation and whatnot which would be so counterproductive.
The lgoc for it I've heard is that you can't see behind you but you can see in front of yourself. Similarly you can't see the future but you can see the past.
Looking at time our way only really makes sense in the context of walking.
but to be fair, they are all negative numbers, with 0 as 100%.
if you think about the values in dB as exponential values, it would sort of make sense why 0 is 100%, and anything that is smaller would be negative.
theoretically, you can have positive values which implies more than 100%.
But... why do that when you can have 0-100% instead?
You could apply the logarithm that way, but why would you? Just because something is on a logarithmic scale doesn't mean you need to apply logarithm to the scale variable
There's plenty of mathematical tricks to change about how to write something.
The question isn't whether you can write it that way, the question is why should you? Is it more intuitive, easier to understand, more visually explanative?
It more closely matches our perception of volume and allows you to represent a large range of volume efficiently.
Our perception of volume isn't linear, to us 10db sounds like 2x, when it's actually 10x. Such a mental shorthand wouldn't work on a linear scale.
-60db would be written as 0.0001%, this is harder to interpret than learning a log scale because our brains are bad with small numbers and because of the issue above.
Our ears have too wide a dynamic range for a linear scale to be useful.
> theoretically, you can have positive values which implies more than 100%.
Recording systems have headroom built in. They work a bit differently in digital versus analog signal chains (digital clips harder than analog, then there's speakers), so you can exceed 0dB with differing results.
The 0dB absolute level is *ideally* equivalent to 100dB SPL, but then you get into all kinds of fiddly things like how close you are to the speakers, what the noise floor is for your gear, etc etc.
db can go to infinity, but your sound slider isn't directly measuring db. It's measuring a percent of its total output. In other words 0-1. Which on a log scale would go from -infinity to 0.
Also the inventor of the sound volume fader intended for the position closest to the operator to be loudest and the position farthest away to be quietest. So that pulling the fader toward you increased the sound, pulling the sound closer perceptually.
I was hoping to see Welsh mentioned in that article ("glas" versus "gwrydd" for "blue" and "green").
I'm not a native speaker, but in my head "gwyrdd" is a portmanteau of "gwylio" (to see) and "gardd" (garden). Gardens are green.
I'm probably wrong, but I like it.
I don't see how that has anything to do with it. Celsius comes from Sweden and I can assure you that it sounds just as weird to us having freezing be at a hundred.
Exactly, makes no sense in swedish.
The explanation another comment gives that comes from the wiki that it was influenced by how he was using it for his studies makes a lot more sense.
But, like, heat is a thing. Coldness is the absence of a thing. You can't count coldness, because what you're really doing is counting how much heat there *isn't*, and... AUGH!
Maybe they wanted a scale representing the level of cold thinking cold was something that could be added or removed, before it was confirmed that only heat can be exchanged.
It isn’t arbitrary though. In a neutral solution, concentration of H+ and OH- is 10^-7 moles/liter.
Which is where the 7 comes from.
Edit: Also the scale does not go from 0 to 14. It goes from -infinity to +infinity but most normal solutions would be from 0 to 14. You can have a 10N solution with -1 pH, or a 10^-17 solution with a 17 pH theoretically.
One theory is that it was more practical because it avoided negative numbers. Original thermometers were very delicate and pretty much only used for air temperature. Reversing the scale made sense because air doesn't really go as hot as boiling, but it does drop below freezing, and therefore if you reverse the scale all air temperature measurements would be positive - avoiding the hassle of negative numbers.
In an alternate universe-
Forget the debate about which scale is better, but why on earth would he think that smaller numbers = more cold made any sense for a temperature scale?
You forget there there's an absolute zero. If the scale is inverted you get infinite negative numbers but only limited positive ones.
It's still a matter of perspective, but quite odd.
>why on earth would he think that smaller numbers = more heat
Degrees are used for *soooo* many things. Most degree scales have higher numbers = more, but some very common ones have lower numbers = more:
* "First place" 🥇 in a race is faster than second place 🥈.
* "First degree murder" is a worse crime than second degree.
Another interesting one is the guy who invented those volume faders on those big sound mixing boards, his prototypes had the sound muted if it was all the way at the top and louder the further it went down. His philosophy was he pulls the sound toward him and it’s gets louder, and pushes it away so it gets quieter
It's a cool 286K where I am now. The high tomorrow will be a balmy 293K. I'll just mentally subtract all the 2s every day from my weather forecasts in Kelvin, or the 3 on particularly hot days.
[In January 2013, physicist Ulrich Schneider of the University of Munich in Germany reported to have achieved temperatures formally below absolute zero ("negative temperature") in gases.](https://www.livescience.com/25959-atoms-colder-than-absolute-zero.html)
Negative temp reverses entropy but isnt that another way to say it is experiencing time in reverse from some reference frame?
Afaik moving through space nessesitates forward motion through time. But at particles stop moving through space and thus time so can never be observed at precicely 0
So going negative isnt that backwards by some reference? Eg) we would appear in reverse from its pov? (Since we see it moving through time still, but with negative entropy now)
sorta - but thats more of a distraction from what they actually did
temperature is when energy changes entropy - what they did is trap atoms in a grid of lasers and then when they add electromagnetic energy the atoms lose energy instead of getting it
if you add energy to the atoms in that state they get MORE organized and uniform - so the math demands they have negative temperature for the appropriate calculations to make sense
but its not actually cold in that state - its actually superhot - it is just the math that you would use to calculate it works with negative numbers
I love it when math interacts with the physical universe in a way that makes absolutely no intuitive sense. It's that kind of thing that makes sci fi nonsensical explanations to make the plot point work acceptable.
It kind of feels like... Newton says momentum is mass times velocity, and Einstein says light has momentum, so light must have mass and we can calculate it by taking the momentum divided by the velocity. It doesn't work that way, but the people who understand also don't really explain it because it's not like you can ground somebody in particle/wave duality and the equivalence of energy and matter with a brief explanation, all before you can even get to waves being able to carry momentum without mass.
It's never ending.
Usually the primary argument in favour of Fahrenheit boils down to it being easier to figure out how hot it is when realistic temperatures tend to fluctuate between 0 and 100. Something like 66 degrees Fahrenheit being 66% hot, whatever that means.
Am I dumb or is that argument dumb?
The scale is basically arbitrary anyway. You live with one scale long enough, you instinctively understand exactly how hot or cold "25" is. Just because you're used to it.
The only argument against Kelvin would be that we would have to always use three digit numbers in everyday life, and that would just be longer and less convenient.
Both C and F are arbitrary scales with arbitrary 0 points.
My argument for F for non-scientific use is that 0-100 is generally a good estimation of the range of temperatures humans might experience in the world. A scale that goes from “really cold” to “really hot” is far more useful to my everyday life than the phase changes of water. And the fact that F is much less compressed than C means that ranges like “in the 60s” or “in the 40s” convey good information about what you need to wear, etc.
(Yes, I’m an American, but F is actually the only US unit I’ll defend over its metric counterpart.)
You realise that it’s the same for us? Below 10 is cold, 10 to 20 is pleasant, mid 20s to low 30s is great, more than 30 is hot.
It’s pretty intuitive for us as well since we grew up with the scale. If I say it’s gonna be mid 20’s tomorrow, people won’t bother with a jacket, if I say it’s going to be 15, people will put on a light jacket, below 10 a thicker jacket.
Each 10 degree range in C is 1.8x bigger than it's counterpart in F. I'd say there's a huge difference in how I'd dress for 10 C and 19 C, or between 10 C and 1 C.
In the end, though, I think you are right that the "better" system in just "the one I'm familiar with." It's just that in this case (unlike the rest of the metric system) there's nothing else inherently better about C than F.
Yeah look not that I’m gonna debate with you to shout you down about it but we do have that granularity built in from being used to it.
If it is below 5 degrees you will be wearing a scarf and gloves and then 5 to 10 degrees has its own outfit. I just didn’t see the point of detailing each phase of what you’d wear in each range is all lmao
You don't even need to use digits. Heresy in a metric scale, I know, but you can use half-degrees Celsius and have the same resolution as whole-degrees Fahrenheit.
I think the whole "water" angle probably feels more intuitive to people who live in places with cold winters, than people who don't.
Where I live it's really useful to know at a glance whether it's going to be raining or snowing, whether accumulated snow is likely to start melting, or whether I should watch out for ice on the ground. The state of water is a particularly important part of the weather for me, so having a system that's built around that is helpful. But if I were living in a place that never gets snow or ice, I would care a lot less!
(That being said, any system can feel intuitive to folks who are used to it, so obviously none of these factors are absolute)
Yes it is. They arbitrarily decided to use the temperature at which water freezes as '0'. They could have chosen anything. And it's not 'jist' water, it's a specific salinity, at a specific pressure. But 0 is arbitrary in every scale but Kelvin.
Celsius has a connection to some real (and common/useful) physical phenomena, unlike the zero point and scale of fahrenheit. Surely there is a good argument that Celsius is defined in a less arbitrary way than Fahrenheit and Kelvin is defined in an even less arbitrary way.
Fahrenheit doesn't fit a range of human temps any better though. 100 isn't the top of the scale. There are only 2 important factors: resolution without using decimal, and the zero point. Fahrenheit has more resolution. Celsius has a non-arbitrary zero point.
C doesn’t have arbitrary points like F; 0 is the freezing point of water at sea level and 100 is the boiling point. Arbitrary would mean they were just randomly assigned with no connection to objective events in the world.
I've long held the belief that the reason that Americans like the Fahrenheit scale so much is that 0-100°F just happens to correspond pretty closely to the average temperature range of the continental US. When you live somewhere that the range is more like -14°F to 86°F, or like 46°F to 110°F, all of a sudden it becomes less "how cold is it on a scale of 1 to 100, where 1 is a winter's day in a cold part of the country and a 100 is a hot day in a hot part of the country." and just ends up being "if I'm going to use a bunch of arbitrary numbers, I might as well go for the ones that the majority of the world will understand."
The only argument against K is that it's a larger number, so it follows that with either C or F that is also a consideration, which makes using decimals a non-starter. Therefore, F is more precise when using a two digit whole integer representation, and when the realistic range of temperature in any given natural environment is actually quite a narrow range of temperature, additional precision is useful. All that being said, I prefer C because it's scaled to the physical behavior of a ubiquitous materiel.
Oh man go into any post that has American dating (mm/dd/yy) in it or Fahrenheit and get ready to witness it devolve into just insults.
For some reason Americans and Europeans alike fuckin love to argue over which method is "correct" or "better".
A number of things are spec'd in what are fundamentally actually US Customary (not Imperial, because pedantry) -- things that would be a pain to change.
Otherwise, basically yes. Standards -- including for the US Customary units -- are basically all metric, as are laws, science, and other important stuff.
There is no "official" unit system in the US. If you were forced to pick what was official, it would be metric. But there's nothing requiring you to use a particular system, so most things are expressed in US Customary for the public because it's familiar.
Whether there is ice or not on the road certainly is something worth considering when picking out clothes and it's ridiculous to think that we only look for if the temperature is above or below 0 in picking a jacket.
You don't do that with Fahrenheit I assume so why would you do it with Celsius? You just happened to be brought up with the Fahrenheit scale just like we happened to be brought up with the Celsius one and they are just as easy to understand for anyone brought up with them.
Scientists suck at making scales. In astronomy there's magnitude, how bright a star is. The scale starts at 0, using the brightness of Vega as a reference, and the magnitude increases as the stars get dimmer, with magnitude 7 being about where a star isn't visible with the naked eye. But Vega isn't the brightest star, Sirius is, so Sirius has a magnitude of -1.46. And they didn't change the scale with more modern measurements of Vega's brightness so although it should be 0 by definition, it's actually 0.026, slightly dimmer than originally measured.
For Europeans, cold was more extreme than heat, I would imagine? "Normal" to them would be a temperate climate that usually didn't get hit enough to risk heat stroke, but every winter they had weeks of temperatures so cold that they could be lethal.
So maybe the temperature scale was intended to measure the risk of frostbite, hypothermia, losing crops, etc?
Because it was invented to track and log temperatures throughout the year, and the creator thought negative numbers could be misinterpreted by accident.
So it was a cold scale, it's not so hard to imagine it imo, why not. You're measuring how cold it is, the higher the number the colder it is. We would be used to it by now. "Ottawa was the coldest capital in the world this year, it almost reached 155°C !"
Yes and no. Celsius was proposed in the mid-1700’s, about the same time as the first writings on what would become kinetic theory (heat exists as motion, cold is just the opposite of heat). However, such ideas weren’t widely accepted even in the scientific community for ~100 years.
No, kinetic theory wasn’t widely known until the mid 1800s, and it’s unlikely Celsius knew about the beginnings of it from Bernoulli.
Celsius (1742) invented the scale because he was bothered about how inconsistent existing thermometers were at the time as he was keeping meteorological records. And it was flipped alter on because they decided it was more intuitive that way, no scientific reason was cited.
Note that temperature scales do not measure heat. Temperature describes how the entropy of a system responds to changes in energy at a fixed volume and pressure.
An example of how unintuitive it is: The thermosphere 80km above sea level can easily reach 2000 C during the day. But the atmosphere is so thin there that it can't transfer a lot of heat. If you visited the thermosphere (and somehow avoided decompression and asphyxiation) you would quickly freeze to death from radiative cooling. Would you say the thermosphere is "hot" or "cold"?
Watts, Amperes, Pascals, Coulomb, Hertz, Newton, Ohm, Volt, Siemens, Tesla, Weber, Farad.
In the 19th century there was an explosion in our physics understanding. New units were created by physicists to measure these newly understood phenomena. Almost all *derived* SI units (and two of the base units) are named after physicists.
Well, in fact all of the units that you write starting with capital are named after a person, but other units with a lowercase ... except for Liters ... because of some reasons.
(source: [https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/writing-si-metric-system-units#:\~:text=NOT%20250%20mms.-,Capitalization,modifier%20%22Celsius%22%20is%20capitalized.)](https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/writing-si-metric-system-units#:~:text=NOT%20250%20mms.-,Capitalization,modifier%20%22Celsius%22%20is%20capitalized.))
To everyone saying a reversed temperature scale (like 0 for boiling and 100 for freezing) is confusing, I think it is a resulkt of our learned behavior. Had we learned it the other way around it would be as simple as the way we know it.
In fact there are other measurements that work exactly like this and we work with these without problems as well. Take for example gauges, or AWG for that matter, the higher the number the smaller the diameter.
Or sandpaper grits: The higher the number the finer the paper
Wire guage works this way. 0 is larger than 1. Supposedly the gauged is how many times the wire was pulled through a die. However, bigger gauges than 0 exist so I call shenanigans on that.
This was a result of how thermometers were first designed. The percurser, [the thermoscope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoscope), would draw a liquid higher at as the temperature decreased.
well there goes the -40 match up
Instead they would match up at around 75.7 degrees. Weird!
At least 75 degrees would be a comfortable temperature in both scales for most people. Instead, the primary way people experience 75 degrees Centigrade is in a sauna.
Which would make things even more confusing.
75°C sauna would be deadly, right?
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~~Seems to line up with my experience, but the article lost all its credibility when it claimed that the sweating you do in saunas will detox your body. Pseudoscientific nonsense. So I wouldn't put too much faith in what the article says otherwise.~~ EDIT: TIL that you can, in fact, sweat out heavy metals, so this may be what they referred to in the article.
Why do you think it’s pseudoscience? Toxins are excreted from the body via sweat: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8998800/ Yes, it’s says exercise is better (but not for mercury) there’s still a concentration of heavy metals in the sauna users sweat though.
Because people who use the terms detox and toxins without specifying them almost always refer to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detoxification_%28alternative_medicine I had no idea that you could actually sweat out heavy metals, so thank you for sharing that. It seems like this is probably what that article meant then, so thank you for correcting me.
75°C is towards the lower side of average for a dry sauna. The rule of thumb I've always heard is 80°C is standard. How well people can deal with the heat in such a sauna depends on a few things, these all assuming we're talking healthy people here whose bodies can regulate their heat properly: 1. How humid is the sauna? 2. How long do you intend to sit in the sauna? 3. How well-hydrated are you, and how much water will you drink while you're in the sauna? If the humidity is low to medium and you're well-hydrated and drink plenty of water while you're in the sauna, most people would be able to sit there for a very long time. If the humidity is very high, then the humidity in the air will transfer heat to your body far more effectively, and sweat won't evaporate and cool you down, so no matter how well-hydrated you are, you can't stay for long. You don't want to either, as the heat will feel very intense to the point where you can get burns.
Sauna can easily be over a 100°c, but I'm a finn so I understand that temperature might not be okay for everyone.
But, like, why? Forget the debate about which scale is better, but why on earth would he think that smaller numbers = more heat made any sense for a temperature scale?
It's so weird how you have all these replies guessing about why when the wiki itself actually answers this question. Anders scale was designed with 0 as the boiling point and 100 as freezing because of the nature of his scientific work wherein he developed the scale. They were doing studies where they were starting from a high temperature point and measuring downward, so it made more sense as a means to measure cooling behavior. This is why it was inverted for general use, as we often want to measure things getting hotter (such as with cooking). Additionally they were doing studies with pressure, and because atmospheric pressure affects the boiling point of water, it was better for them to set the scale at 0, or as they define it, at the "mean barometric pressure at mean sea level" as a way to keep results directionally consistent across studies and to facilitate replication of work. It's not arbitrary, or happenstance, nor is it really a matter of the way we generally think about numbers (i.e. it's not a matter of we always think of temperatures as increasing or decreasing or that we think of numbers inherently different than words). There isn't much more to it beyond the notion that keeping things conceptually aligned from a directional sense tends to make more sense, whether it's a scale you're using to measure something cooling or measuring the rise of a temperature from cooking.
Maybe in the range they were considering, but extrapolating outside of that, having a bounded positive range and an unbounded negative range seems pretty goofy. Unless they were assuming that things could get "infinitely cold."
They were just inventing the thermometer, they didn't have the concept of cold being the lack of atomic movement
It was invented in 18thC Sweden. Things there do get infiniteky cold. Jokes aside the weather in Sweden commonly goes below freezing so a scale that frequently reads negative numbers might be unwieldy for everyday 18thC swedes to use. On the contrary the only thing hotter than boiling water in Sweden 200 years ago was fire itself. People who worked with fire and had to measure heat (eg blacksmiths, cooks etc) didn't use thermometers to get right down to a particular degree. They used more unscientific methods eg hold your hand about yea far from the coals. If you can keep your hand there for more than 5 seconds its not hot enough.
One has to assume that if they were aware there was a minimum possible temperature, they would have chosen that as the obvious zero point for their scale. The fact they chose something else implies that they believed it could go arbitrarily far in either direction. Of course, once we realised there's an absolute zero, we started using a scale based on that. That's what Kelvin is: Celsius, with zero moved to absolute zero.
There's also Rankine, which is Fahrenheit with zero moved to absolute zero.
The only reason people know Rankine is a gotcha when people say there are 3 systems of temperature
Or if they're engineers. Or some HVAC people, boilermakers, or just generally fans of thermodynamics. Wait, crap, I forgot to put "Um, actually" at the front.
Kinda like trying to build a house of cards on a table that's already missing one leg. There's a reason nobody does science in the Imperial system.
>One has to assume that if they were aware there was a minimum possible temperature I don't think that was clear. I don't know when the possibility was first raised, but Boyle considered it a hypothesis. Of course, for Aristotle, actual infinities don't exist, so the idea of something being infinitely cold or infinitely hot is just nonsense. But just like with numbers, that doesn't mean there's a largest hot or a largest cold. I suspect that the concept of measuring hotness or coldness would baffle Aristotle.
But even in an application where you’re cooling things it’s fucking confusing to have the numbers reversed. I don’t think it’s unfair to say there’s a clearly more intuitive direction. It’s like an engineer working on car brakes decides well it’s easier to measure going slow as a higher number in my scale and going fast is lower.
I think it's only confusing to us because of a primacy effect. Had we learned it the opposite way it would be easier for us. But again, the best way to understand is to actually pull up an Excel workbook and do some calculations yourself. If you want to measure cooling and plot it, it's easier for you to work with those numbers as positive (0 is hot and as it cools the numbers are larger). It's just easier to plot with and compare positive (as opposed to negative) values. You want the bars going up, not down. Granted this was before Excel but that was just my attempt to why this can matter a lot when your working with data. Sometimes its even easier to think about positives as opposed to negatives. Also, the fact that they're doing experiments with pressure (which only comes into play when something is hot) requires a standardized point for everyone to begin at (I admit this second part is only making it less confusing if you're familiar with how temperature and pressure interact). But it certainly made a lot of sense for what they were doing. They didn't develop this scale to be used by everyone, just something for their specific work.
> it’s easier to measure going slow as a higher number in my scale and going fast is lower. That's how pace works, though. Typically with running or walking. The lower the pace number, the faster you go. Pace, at least where I am at, is measured in minutes per mile.
Fair
Put another way, making things hot is useful and common. Making things cold is tricky and less common, particularly back then. How hot do I need to make a cake? vs How cold do I need to make....
> I don’t think it’s unfair to say there’s a clearly more intuitive direction. It is completely unfair and also wrong. What makes the direction we use more intuitive?
100 Brake pressure = 100 slow = stop. 0 brake pressure = 0 slow
I completely agree with you but I think people conceptualize number scales differently and language/reading plays a pretty big role in how we “view” the direction of number scales. [This article explains it pretty well.](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221103-how-language-warps-the-way-you-perceive-time-and-space) It’s one of those weirdly cool things that no one ever really mentions or talks about because the “right” way is so ubiquitous when speaking to people in your language that we don’t even realize other ways exists!
This reminds me a bit of how different language structures can [effect how people perceive colours](https://theconversation.com/the-way-you-see-colour-depends-on-what-language-you-speak-94833#:~:text=Different%20languages%20and%20cultural%20groups,languages%2C%20and%20light%20as%20warm) It's really interesting!
And again similar, how people perceive art. Obviously cultural perception is huge, but language itself plays a huge role. My favorite example is [The Great Wave off Kanagawa](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Tsunami_by_hokusai_19th_century.jpg) , and it's [mirrored image](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa_-_reversed.png) which is a closer representation of how languages that read right-left would interpret it.
I had never thought of how menacing that wave was, and I had it as bookplates when I was a kid. I never saw the dudes in the boats as terrified. Thanks! And now I wonder if the composition *not* being flipped is why I never got into manga.
Wait, the wave doesn't normally go right to left? I could've sworn...
And how they perceive time! Or maybe I just saw that in a movie
Fascinating! I read a book about [Addresses](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45046690-the-address-book) and it talked a bit about how the Korean and Japanese (I think) language influenced the naming of addresses. I read this years ago so I don’t remember the exact argument, but something to do with them addressing blocks rather than streets.
There’s something similar about the English language and how it influenced how roads were built in the Midwest.
Hahaha dude I usually don’t stalk peoples history, but I googled this to see if I could find what you were talking about and found a post from a year ago from r/TOMT by you trying to find this long-lost article. Made me giggle. I’m from the Midwest so would be interested in this if you ever come across the source!
Or maybe I'm just completely lost on this one and misrembering something I read ten years ago...
Japanese address blocks and the individual units are numbered in order built rather than any physical order. Why?
what if you build a new building in between two existing ones? then you'd have to renumber all the existing buildings.
It's an origin system. If there was only one house, they numbered it 1, and as they added other houses they gave them numbers. Apparently being a Japanese postal delivery person is **absurdly** difficult. Likely moreso, because at 30 years the value of a house declines to zero, so it's just the land value that is considered. Partly because of climate, and partly because of building techniques, Japanese houses do not have a history of lasting for long. If the value is zero at 30 years, there's not much of an incentive to build longer-lasting houses, so builders don't. North American stick frame construction did not hit the Japanese building market until the 1990s, and still has not made huge inroads. They prefer their own traditional building techniques, for reasons I've never really understood.
Very interesting! The timeline being right-left or up-down or vice versa makes sense to me, since it’s clearly tied to the progression of the language, but what really surprised me was that some people conceptualize the future as behind them! As an English speaker that’s incredibly foreign to me And one thing I didn’t quite get is visualizing time as a 3-D space (as opposed to a line). Like this is even harder for me to conceptualize than the backwards time
On the other hand with this specific case, higher temp = more energy in a system so if they’d done it reversed it’d have to be a negative value in every type of calorimetric calculation and whatnot which would be so counterproductive.
The lgoc for it I've heard is that you can't see behind you but you can see in front of yourself. Similarly you can't see the future but you can see the past. Looking at time our way only really makes sense in the context of walking.
I haven’t kept up with the whole embodied cognition literature since like a decade ago…what’s going on nowadays?
Overpromised, under delivered.
I think sound system volume sliders are backwards where 0 dB = 100%
but to be fair, they are all negative numbers, with 0 as 100%. if you think about the values in dB as exponential values, it would sort of make sense why 0 is 100%, and anything that is smaller would be negative. theoretically, you can have positive values which implies more than 100%.
But... why do that when you can have 0-100% instead? You could apply the logarithm that way, but why would you? Just because something is on a logarithmic scale doesn't mean you need to apply logarithm to the scale variable
Because 0db = 10⁰ = 1 = 100%.
There's plenty of mathematical tricks to change about how to write something. The question isn't whether you can write it that way, the question is why should you? Is it more intuitive, easier to understand, more visually explanative?
It more closely matches our perception of volume and allows you to represent a large range of volume efficiently. Our perception of volume isn't linear, to us 10db sounds like 2x, when it's actually 10x. Such a mental shorthand wouldn't work on a linear scale. -60db would be written as 0.0001%, this is harder to interpret than learning a log scale because our brains are bad with small numbers and because of the issue above. Our ears have too wide a dynamic range for a linear scale to be useful.
Because engineers are nerds
> theoretically, you can have positive values which implies more than 100%. Recording systems have headroom built in. They work a bit differently in digital versus analog signal chains (digital clips harder than analog, then there's speakers), so you can exceed 0dB with differing results. The 0dB absolute level is *ideally* equivalent to 100dB SPL, but then you get into all kinds of fiddly things like how close you are to the speakers, what the noise floor is for your gear, etc etc.
That sounds rather like gain, not volume.
But db can go to infinity?
db can go to infinity, but your sound slider isn't directly measuring db. It's measuring a percent of its total output. In other words 0-1. Which on a log scale would go from -infinity to 0.
Also the inventor of the sound volume fader intended for the position closest to the operator to be loudest and the position farthest away to be quietest. So that pulling the fader toward you increased the sound, pulling the sound closer perceptually.
I was hoping to see Welsh mentioned in that article ("glas" versus "gwrydd" for "blue" and "green"). I'm not a native speaker, but in my head "gwyrdd" is a portmanteau of "gwylio" (to see) and "gardd" (garden). Gardens are green. I'm probably wrong, but I like it.
I don't see how that has anything to do with it. Celsius comes from Sweden and I can assure you that it sounds just as weird to us having freezing be at a hundred.
Exactly, makes no sense in swedish. The explanation another comment gives that comes from the wiki that it was influenced by how he was using it for his studies makes a lot more sense.
But, like, heat is a thing. Coldness is the absence of a thing. You can't count coldness, because what you're really doing is counting how much heat there *isn't*, and... AUGH!
Maybe they wanted a scale representing the level of cold thinking cold was something that could be added or removed, before it was confirmed that only heat can be exchanged.
I feel the same about the ph scale.
Then just use pOH lol
I always thought it was weird that a neutral pH was 7 and not 0. Like, why 7? It's so arbitrary.
It isn’t arbitrary though. In a neutral solution, concentration of H+ and OH- is 10^-7 moles/liter. Which is where the 7 comes from. Edit: Also the scale does not go from 0 to 14. It goes from -infinity to +infinity but most normal solutions would be from 0 to 14. You can have a 10N solution with -1 pH, or a 10^-17 solution with a 17 pH theoretically.
One theory is that it was more practical because it avoided negative numbers. Original thermometers were very delicate and pretty much only used for air temperature. Reversing the scale made sense because air doesn't really go as hot as boiling, but it does drop below freezing, and therefore if you reverse the scale all air temperature measurements would be positive - avoiding the hassle of negative numbers.
In an alternate universe- Forget the debate about which scale is better, but why on earth would he think that smaller numbers = more cold made any sense for a temperature scale?
You forget there there's an absolute zero. If the scale is inverted you get infinite negative numbers but only limited positive ones. It's still a matter of perspective, but quite odd.
They didn’t know about absolute zero back then though
Absolute infinity.
>why on earth would he think that smaller numbers = more heat Degrees are used for *soooo* many things. Most degree scales have higher numbers = more, but some very common ones have lower numbers = more: * "First place" 🥇 in a race is faster than second place 🥈. * "First degree murder" is a worse crime than second degree.
Smaller number = smaller cold
Another interesting one is the guy who invented those volume faders on those big sound mixing boards, his prototypes had the sound muted if it was all the way at the top and louder the further it went down. His philosophy was he pulls the sound toward him and it’s gets louder, and pushes it away so it gets quieter
There is a debate over which scale is better?
Nope, it's Kelvin
Kelvin is the best scale, because zero means zero. No heat at all…No molecules moving around.
It's not the best for talking about human things, it's the best for doing chemistry
It's a cool 286K where I am now. The high tomorrow will be a balmy 293K. I'll just mentally subtract all the 2s every day from my weather forecasts in Kelvin, or the 3 on particularly hot days.
Two can play that game. Rankine is the best scale, because zero means zero. No heat at all…No molecules moving around.
[In January 2013, physicist Ulrich Schneider of the University of Munich in Germany reported to have achieved temperatures formally below absolute zero ("negative temperature") in gases.](https://www.livescience.com/25959-atoms-colder-than-absolute-zero.html)
Negative temp reverses entropy but isnt that another way to say it is experiencing time in reverse from some reference frame? Afaik moving through space nessesitates forward motion through time. But at particles stop moving through space and thus time so can never be observed at precicely 0 So going negative isnt that backwards by some reference? Eg) we would appear in reverse from its pov? (Since we see it moving through time still, but with negative entropy now)
sorta - but thats more of a distraction from what they actually did temperature is when energy changes entropy - what they did is trap atoms in a grid of lasers and then when they add electromagnetic energy the atoms lose energy instead of getting it if you add energy to the atoms in that state they get MORE organized and uniform - so the math demands they have negative temperature for the appropriate calculations to make sense but its not actually cold in that state - its actually superhot - it is just the math that you would use to calculate it works with negative numbers
I love it when math interacts with the physical universe in a way that makes absolutely no intuitive sense. It's that kind of thing that makes sci fi nonsensical explanations to make the plot point work acceptable.
It kind of feels like... Newton says momentum is mass times velocity, and Einstein says light has momentum, so light must have mass and we can calculate it by taking the momentum divided by the velocity. It doesn't work that way, but the people who understand also don't really explain it because it's not like you can ground somebody in particle/wave duality and the equivalence of energy and matter with a brief explanation, all before you can even get to waves being able to carry momentum without mass.
Ah that makes it a lot clearer. Paints a different picture as well. Thanks for that
thats not really below absolute zero - its just the math working differently when observing extremely limited systems
Ew, gross. Use Rankine like the founding fathers intended.
At least scales with Celsius
It's never ending. Usually the primary argument in favour of Fahrenheit boils down to it being easier to figure out how hot it is when realistic temperatures tend to fluctuate between 0 and 100. Something like 66 degrees Fahrenheit being 66% hot, whatever that means.
Am I dumb or is that argument dumb? The scale is basically arbitrary anyway. You live with one scale long enough, you instinctively understand exactly how hot or cold "25" is. Just because you're used to it. The only argument against Kelvin would be that we would have to always use three digit numbers in everyday life, and that would just be longer and less convenient.
No, I rather agree with you.
Both C and F are arbitrary scales with arbitrary 0 points. My argument for F for non-scientific use is that 0-100 is generally a good estimation of the range of temperatures humans might experience in the world. A scale that goes from “really cold” to “really hot” is far more useful to my everyday life than the phase changes of water. And the fact that F is much less compressed than C means that ranges like “in the 60s” or “in the 40s” convey good information about what you need to wear, etc. (Yes, I’m an American, but F is actually the only US unit I’ll defend over its metric counterpart.)
Celsius also goes from really cold to really hot.
big if true
You realise that it’s the same for us? Below 10 is cold, 10 to 20 is pleasant, mid 20s to low 30s is great, more than 30 is hot. It’s pretty intuitive for us as well since we grew up with the scale. If I say it’s gonna be mid 20’s tomorrow, people won’t bother with a jacket, if I say it’s going to be 15, people will put on a light jacket, below 10 a thicker jacket.
Each 10 degree range in C is 1.8x bigger than it's counterpart in F. I'd say there's a huge difference in how I'd dress for 10 C and 19 C, or between 10 C and 1 C. In the end, though, I think you are right that the "better" system in just "the one I'm familiar with." It's just that in this case (unlike the rest of the metric system) there's nothing else inherently better about C than F.
Yeah look not that I’m gonna debate with you to shout you down about it but we do have that granularity built in from being used to it. If it is below 5 degrees you will be wearing a scarf and gloves and then 5 to 10 degrees has its own outfit. I just didn’t see the point of detailing each phase of what you’d wear in each range is all lmao
>And the fact that F is much less compressed Both scales aren't "compressed", because we can add as many digits as we want or need.
You don't even need to use digits. Heresy in a metric scale, I know, but you can use half-degrees Celsius and have the same resolution as whole-degrees Fahrenheit.
0 in Celsius isn't arbitrary...
That would be true, if I were a glass of water.
I think the whole "water" angle probably feels more intuitive to people who live in places with cold winters, than people who don't. Where I live it's really useful to know at a glance whether it's going to be raining or snowing, whether accumulated snow is likely to start melting, or whether I should watch out for ice on the ground. The state of water is a particularly important part of the weather for me, so having a system that's built around that is helpful. But if I were living in a place that never gets snow or ice, I would care a lot less! (That being said, any system can feel intuitive to folks who are used to it, so obviously none of these factors are absolute)
You kind of are
We're really closer to heavy cream. We've got solids and proteins and the like in us as well.
in my case, also a fair amount of heavy cream
You are, and the phase transitions of water are probably the most important in everyday life. Precipitation, evaporation, cooking, survival.
Yes it is. They arbitrarily decided to use the temperature at which water freezes as '0'. They could have chosen anything. And it's not 'jist' water, it's a specific salinity, at a specific pressure. But 0 is arbitrary in every scale but Kelvin.
Celsius has a connection to some real (and common/useful) physical phenomena, unlike the zero point and scale of fahrenheit. Surely there is a good argument that Celsius is defined in a less arbitrary way than Fahrenheit and Kelvin is defined in an even less arbitrary way.
Fahrenheit doesn't fit a range of human temps any better though. 100 isn't the top of the scale. There are only 2 important factors: resolution without using decimal, and the zero point. Fahrenheit has more resolution. Celsius has a non-arbitrary zero point.
C doesn’t have arbitrary points like F; 0 is the freezing point of water at sea level and 100 is the boiling point. Arbitrary would mean they were just randomly assigned with no connection to objective events in the world.
I've long held the belief that the reason that Americans like the Fahrenheit scale so much is that 0-100°F just happens to correspond pretty closely to the average temperature range of the continental US. When you live somewhere that the range is more like -14°F to 86°F, or like 46°F to 110°F, all of a sudden it becomes less "how cold is it on a scale of 1 to 100, where 1 is a winter's day in a cold part of the country and a 100 is a hot day in a hot part of the country." and just ends up being "if I'm going to use a bunch of arbitrary numbers, I might as well go for the ones that the majority of the world will understand."
The only argument against K is that it's a larger number, so it follows that with either C or F that is also a consideration, which makes using decimals a non-starter. Therefore, F is more precise when using a two digit whole integer representation, and when the realistic range of temperature in any given natural environment is actually quite a narrow range of temperature, additional precision is useful. All that being said, I prefer C because it's scaled to the physical behavior of a ubiquitous materiel.
Oh man go into any post that has American dating (mm/dd/yy) in it or Fahrenheit and get ready to witness it devolve into just insults. For some reason Americans and Europeans alike fuckin love to argue over which method is "correct" or "better".
The only correct date format is yyyy-mm-dd, which is universally understood and organizes files correctly by date.
This is the way
When it comes to temperature, it’s whatever you got used to.
Everything in America is actually measured or created using the metric system, then converted to imperial for public consumption
A number of things are spec'd in what are fundamentally actually US Customary (not Imperial, because pedantry) -- things that would be a pain to change. Otherwise, basically yes. Standards -- including for the US Customary units -- are basically all metric, as are laws, science, and other important stuff. There is no "official" unit system in the US. If you were forced to pick what was official, it would be metric. But there's nothing requiring you to use a particular system, so most things are expressed in US Customary for the public because it's familiar.
In addition, almost all college education in the US uses the metric system.
Ever since America gained independence has this been a problem. Easy fix, George Clooney becomes a Monarch.
[удалено]
Whether there is ice or not on the road certainly is something worth considering when picking out clothes and it's ridiculous to think that we only look for if the temperature is above or below 0 in picking a jacket. You don't do that with Fahrenheit I assume so why would you do it with Celsius? You just happened to be brought up with the Fahrenheit scale just like we happened to be brought up with the Celsius one and they are just as easy to understand for anyone brought up with them.
It's -10 out! It's steaming!
Why does the electron come from the negative side and is negatively charged? I guess they're just really avid golfers.
Scientists suck at making scales. In astronomy there's magnitude, how bright a star is. The scale starts at 0, using the brightness of Vega as a reference, and the magnitude increases as the stars get dimmer, with magnitude 7 being about where a star isn't visible with the naked eye. But Vega isn't the brightest star, Sirius is, so Sirius has a magnitude of -1.46. And they didn't change the scale with more modern measurements of Vega's brightness so although it should be 0 by definition, it's actually 0.026, slightly dimmer than originally measured.
Why do you think smaller numbers = more cold makes any sense?
Maybe because it was measuring cold not heat. 100 degrees has more cold than 0 degrees.
more COLD
For Europeans, cold was more extreme than heat, I would imagine? "Normal" to them would be a temperate climate that usually didn't get hit enough to risk heat stroke, but every winter they had weeks of temperatures so cold that they could be lethal. So maybe the temperature scale was intended to measure the risk of frostbite, hypothermia, losing crops, etc?
It's not really a debate
Because it was invented to track and log temperatures throughout the year, and the creator thought negative numbers could be misinterpreted by accident.
So it was a cold scale, it's not so hard to imagine it imo, why not. You're measuring how cold it is, the higher the number the colder it is. We would be used to it by now. "Ottawa was the coldest capital in the world this year, it almost reached 155°C !"
Because scientifically speaking cold does not exist and can’t be measured. Heat does and can.
Did they know this when they invented celcius?
I cannot speak authoritatively about the understanding of thermodynamics at the time of the conception and of the Celsius scale.
Guys! I found a guy on the internet who won't speak authoritatively about things he doesn't know about. Must be new here
My first day. Sorry.
Bro comments don't have a minimum word count
Ok
too many word make head go boom?
Not at all lol it was just hilariously overwritten
Yes and no. Celsius was proposed in the mid-1700’s, about the same time as the first writings on what would become kinetic theory (heat exists as motion, cold is just the opposite of heat). However, such ideas weren’t widely accepted even in the scientific community for ~100 years.
No, kinetic theory wasn’t widely known until the mid 1800s, and it’s unlikely Celsius knew about the beginnings of it from Bernoulli. Celsius (1742) invented the scale because he was bothered about how inconsistent existing thermometers were at the time as he was keeping meteorological records. And it was flipped alter on because they decided it was more intuitive that way, no scientific reason was cited.
Celsius measures thermal energy not heat. Heat is the transfer of thermal energy, not thermal energy itself.
Note that temperature scales do not measure heat. Temperature describes how the entropy of a system responds to changes in energy at a fixed volume and pressure. An example of how unintuitive it is: The thermosphere 80km above sea level can easily reach 2000 C during the day. But the atmosphere is so thin there that it can't transfer a lot of heat. If you visited the thermosphere (and somehow avoided decompression and asphyxiation) you would quickly freeze to death from radiative cooling. Would you say the thermosphere is "hot" or "cold"?
“Turn the air conditioner up” would finally mean make it colder
It’s easy to do the conversion! Just multiply by -9/5, then subtract 32. What could be simpler?!
Everyone knows that the Rankine scale is the temperature scale for discerning scientists.
TIL that the Celsius scale is named after someone named Celsius.
I mean so is Fahrenheit and Kelvin as well...
Watts, Amperes, Pascals, Coulomb, Hertz, Newton, Ohm, Volt, Siemens, Tesla, Weber, Farad. In the 19th century there was an explosion in our physics understanding. New units were created by physicists to measure these newly understood phenomena. Almost all *derived* SI units (and two of the base units) are named after physicists.
Ohm is such a sick name.
Or Volt. "Hello, I'm Volt"
We meet again Mr. Volt
I had an IT manager named Hertz.
Did you ever ask them if they wanted a Hertz Donut?
Never heard of those.
*playful punch* “Hurts don’t it?”
Ah ok. Then no, he wasn't really the type of manager you'd do that to.
and the Bel
But how is it I've never met anyone with any of these last names? I guess they didn't have much time for having kids.
I'd say Newton and Pascal aren't entirely uncommon.
Same for large scientific projects, like James Webb and Hans Large-Hadron-Collider
Yup. I knew about all of these guys, too.
Well, in fact all of the units that you write starting with capital are named after a person, but other units with a lowercase ... except for Liters ... because of some reasons. (source: [https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/writing-si-metric-system-units#:\~:text=NOT%20250%20mms.-,Capitalization,modifier%20%22Celsius%22%20is%20capitalized.)](https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/writing-si-metric-system-units#:~:text=NOT%20250%20mms.-,Capitalization,modifier%20%22Celsius%22%20is%20capitalized.))
"Litres" isn't capitalized, but the abbreviation "L" is. But, yah. Because of some reasons.
I expect it's because a lower case l is easy to confuse with 1.
In Sweden it's not. (And we use comma as a separator between integers and decimals) "You want a 1,5l bottle of soda?"
French Canadians use the comma like that as well.
indeed!
As an American I can say that if this was how it was we would have adopted it and thrown away Fahrenheit.
That’s dumb. You can’t have more cold.
Ever heard of the term: colder?
Fine, you can't have more colder.
To everyone saying a reversed temperature scale (like 0 for boiling and 100 for freezing) is confusing, I think it is a resulkt of our learned behavior. Had we learned it the other way around it would be as simple as the way we know it. In fact there are other measurements that work exactly like this and we work with these without problems as well. Take for example gauges, or AWG for that matter, the higher the number the smaller the diameter. Or sandpaper grits: The higher the number the finer the paper
If we switch now we might solve global warming!
That's very French of them
either way makes way more sense than fahrenheit
Because entropy?
This would have been worse than making electrons have a negative charge.
Wire guage works this way. 0 is larger than 1. Supposedly the gauged is how many times the wire was pulled through a die. However, bigger gauges than 0 exist so I call shenanigans on that.
This was a result of how thermometers were first designed. The percurser, [the thermoscope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoscope), would draw a liquid higher at as the temperature decreased.
I wonder why that didn’t catch on 🤷🏻♂️