Pedantry:
K and °R agree on 0
K and °C agree on the unit difference
°F and °R agree on the unit difference
°R and °Ra are the exact same thing (??)
Celsius and Fahrenheit agree on -40, but since they're scales that scale at different rates there's bound to be some value where they intersect rather than some meaningful number like Kelvin and Rankine being zeroed to Absolute Zero
Also Rankine, being an absolute scale, theoretically shouldn't be in ° anything, and it's only some weird historical quirk that is the reason it usually is called degrees.
Imagine if some distance measuring system decided their zero was at like 10 feet.
Let me just shorten this down 8 feet
welds on an extra 2 feet
Rankine and Kelvin have zero at the same point, which is absolute zero, and should not be used with the degree symbol
This concludes my TED talk
According to Wikipedia Rankine is properly used with the degree symbol, but sometimes is not by analogy with Kelvin.
I went down a huge rabbit hole cause of this. I personally like °F over °C but agree it's arbitrary. So I tried to make a scale that started at the coldest air temp on earth (some day in Antarctica) and went to the hottest day on earth (some day in death valley) and put the coldest day at 0°A and the hottest at 100°A.
Sadly this made a scale that was less precise than I'd like. I like that I can feel the difference between 73°F and 74°F and don't want to have to use decimals.
So maybe the end points could be only places where people actually live. Well it looks like some people live in Russia around -70°C and some people live in northern Africa around 50°C so if you just take °C and add 60 you can get a -10 to 110 scale where most temps would fall between 0 and 100. Still has the unit difference of °C (which I don't like) but I like that most temps are between 0 and 100. I also don't really like negative temperature since it seems wonky.
To "fix" the unit scale you could just multiply everything by 2 so the difference between each full degree is half as much. So temps would be between -20 and 220. °A = 2(°C + 60) °A = 2(°C) + 120
And it turns out I (basically) created the Fahrenheit scale but moved. °F= 1.8(°C) + 32
TL;DR: I'm stupid and this was fun but also a waste of time lol
Celsius is tied to points of ice melting and water vaporising. Since water is very important for the life on our planet, it makes even more sense than arbitrary chosen meters or seconds.
At sea level. Welcome to La Paz, where the triple point is made up and the freezing point doesn't matter!
does you scale change as Earth warms?
Add a scale revision for each year to the meme
Never heard about °R and °RA before this meme
It's the Rankine. Some Scottish dude wanted to use Kelvin without using Kelvin. It's basically the Fahrenheit scale but with 0˚R set at absolute zero.
0˚R = 0K and 1˚R = 0K + 1˚F
From what I can gather, R and Ra are the same thing?
They are. The post could swap one of them out for Re or Rø instead and it would work, though
Celsius tried to fit too much into 100 notches to please big math.
F is more nuanced with more notches, but the ends aren't logical. It coukd be shifted perhaps, but how?
If freezing was moved to 0, then water boiling would be 180
Perhaps C could have had a 200 degree range, then it would be closer to F and not so hard to convert.
But also: Scientists are important and we shouldn't make it too easy, it demeans their work. Maybe make the C scale show water boiling at 183.4521 degrees so scientific calculations are more impressive-looking and respectable.
and not so hard to convert
"Please change the entire world's system to make it easier for the one country that uses a different one"
The SI unit scales are chosen to fit together to avoid "respectable" scientific calculations.
To heat one milliliter (1 ml) of water one degree Celsius (1 °C) you need one calorie (1 cal) of energy.
Also the dimensions of one milliliter, is one cubic centimeter (1 cm^3), and that amount of water weighs 1 gram (1 g).
Thus 1 liter of water needs 1 kcal of energy to heat up 1 °C.
It's not limited to 100 steps. The decimal system gives you infinite granularity.
0 lbs/lg = Absense of weight.
0 inches/centimeters = Absence of size.
0 Kelvin = Absence of heat.
If something is 0lbs, 0 inches and 0 Kelvin: does it even exist? 🤔
0lbs is absence of weight, 0kg is absence of mass. Terrestrials, smdh...
This is more like if you measured altitude by counting from sea level vs the center of the earth vs the top of Mount Everest or something
But R and K agree on zero
Rankine isn't pointing a gun at Kelvin because of this, but Kelvin is pointing one at Rankine because Rankine is an abomination that should not be
This is why Celsius is the only SI unit that isn’t just wholly better than its imperial counterpart. Both F and C are fairly arbitrary, but in my view F has the slight edge by giving numbers 0-100 in most weather conditions across earth.
Kelvin is the SI unit. Anyway also for the weather Celsius is clearer: Below 0 = snow, above 0 = rain. And Celsius at least has fixed points that can be recreated - if all thermometers and data on scales were lost we could easily recreate °C, but not °F.
Ah well I should have said metric measurement then. It is part of the metric system, yes?
If you can’t remember the number 32 then I guess. Personally I think it’s pretty bizarre to have negative temperatures all the time but whatever floats your boat.
Regarding losing all thermometers and data… if you lost the definition of Celsius there would be no way to recreate it. This seems maybe more likely then your scenario.
No seriously what is significant about 0F? I live in a place that sees a lot of negative F too.
It's so arbitrary. If it was 0 at freezing water and 100 at human body temp I'd understand it but no, it's literally nothing significant in people's lives. It has no tangible anchor.
It's purely emotion keeping it around.
0°F is the coldest night Mister Fahrenheit has ever witnessed, thinking it couldn't become any colder than this.
100°F is Mister Fahrenheit's slightly feverish body temperature.
?????
PS: Pretty much all other countries also had their own measurement systems and simply switched to metric because it made sense. I'm glad we did, and that pretty much all others did too.
PPS: I'd also be up for revamping time measurement, why can't we have 10h a day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute? 100.000 seconds in total per day, currently we have 86.400 so a second would only become slightly shorter.
The French tried to implement that in the First Republic, together with 12 months à 30 days per year, 3 weeks à 10 days per month and 5 (6) extra days at the end of the year to make it work (from Christmas to New Year, how thematic!)
It failed because the French were fearing they'd have to work more (if they'd also only have 2 days off per 10d instead of per 7d). One of the biggest tragedies in French history. Without the week reform the time reform might've succeeded.
Yep Celsius is 1-100 for water and Fahrenheit is 1-100 for humans
I've always hated this justification of Fahrenheit. For it to be a good argument, 50 °F would need to be the ideal comfortable temperature. But instead 50 is really fucking cold. 100 just isn't as hot as 0 is cold.
I think it depends on the person which is the problem, for me 50 isn't that cold but 100 is completely unbearable
Yeah, 50 F is chilly.
PSI
0 100
┣━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┫
Dead Potentially survivable
Vs
Atm
0 100
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Dead Dead
Vs
kPa
0 100
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Dead Totally Fine
Fully agree with you. How does that make sense:
Really hot summer days (30°C) are 86°F
Usual summer days (25°C) are 77°F
Room temperature is ~70°F
Spring / autumn days (20°C) are 68°F
Chilly outside / late autumn / early spring days (~10°C) are 50°F
Cool outside / warm winter days (~0°C) are 32°F
Cold outside / usual winter days (-10°C) are ~15°F
Winter nights (bit below -20°C) are ~ -10°F
Fahrenheit users keep saying how strange it is to have negative temperatures when using °C, but it's just the same in Fahrenheit except the whole scale makes less sense since it's using fully arbitrary, not recreatable points for 0 and 100.
Fahrenheit is 1-100 for humans
Only if you grow up with it lol. Fahrenheit makes no sense to me
Meanwhile, Pi and the Fine Structure Constant watching the show, passing each other the popcorn.
The best part about the fine structure constant is that it is not related to any other thing. It just is.
It's a magic number that just emerges in physics.
And it is not constant.
Even though it is.
Dimensionless numbers, not dependent on any mere mortal, subjective arbitrary unit of measurement like length (meters or yards or cubits - same difference) or time.
Whether you are on Earth or a planet in Andromeda or a billion light-years away, if you study subatomic structure you WILL bump into the fraction 1/137. Just like you will in geometry with 3.1416.
At least Kelvin and Rankine agree on the zero, soooo...
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