So every time the Celsius Fahrenheit debate comes out, there is always the point made about “Fahrenheit makes more sense, it tells you how is out there: 0 is freezing, 100 is roasting hot”.
And yes, that might be accurate but showcases that USA citizens only care about themselves, they do not even care about physics or chemistry.
The “it works for me therefore it is good” mentality is what they bring to the world and the most clear example is their choice of framing for justifying Fahrenheit over Celsius.
Celsius is based on water. 0ºC is freezing, 100ºC is boiling. Water is a good metric to go on, but it’s not very good for conveying to humans what is hot and what is cold, because even though we are made up of a lot of water, 0-100ºF is a scale that makes more sense to us. The equivalent in Celsius is something like -15 to something like 45ºC. And that makes less sense.
I’m a huge advocate of metric everywhere, but to say Celsius is objectively better than Fahrenheit is kind of silly.
They’re both based on water, but Fahrenheit has a backstory.
The first iteration was designed by Ole Rømer. Rømer, an astronomer, liked working in 60s, so he defined a temperature scale where 0° was the coldest day in winter and 60° was the boiling point of water*. Due to historical accident of when Rømer made his minimum temperature measurement, the freezing point of water was defined as 7.5°.
Daniel Fahrenheit didn’t like this; he though the freezing point of water should be an integer. So he slightly modified Rømer’s scale, making the degrees a hair smaller. 0° remained the same, but in the Fahrenheit temperature scale, water freezes at 8° and boils at 64°*.
(Side note: Rømer and Fahrenheit used ice-ammonia mixtures to calibrate their thermometers, but those were not used to define 0°, contrary to popular belief).
Fahrenheit’s early thermometers used alcohol, but he later started using mercury for more accurate instruments. Because mercury expands more than alcohol with the same temperature change, he invented a new scale in which the degrees were 1/4 the magnitude of his previous effort. In Fahrenheit’s mercury scale, water freezes at 32° and boils at 256°*.
…but some time after that, it turned out that Rømer’s original measurement of the boiling point of water was off by a lot (hence the asterisks in the above paragraphs). The actual difference between the freezing and boiling points if water was not 224°, but 180° (no doubt this would have pleased Rømer). The magnitude of a degree remained the same, but the actual boiling point of water turned out to be 212°.
And now you know.
Right, Celsius is not even part of the metric system. It is an honorary member of the SI units, but that doesn’t make it metric. It would make little sense to talk about kilo-degrees, or micro-degrees, because degrees Celsius doesn’t relate well to the amount of heat. That’s what Kelvin is for.
Kelvin is still rooted in Celsius, just by an offset of 273.15
For that matter, so is Fahrenheit, with the relationship (x + 459.67) × 5/9 K, where x is degrees F.
Let’s make a new scale, between 0 and 1
Zero is where everything turns solid, One where everything boils and vaporizes…
Finally, a sensible proposal!