One of my pet peeves is people thinking units of the past or people in the past were stupid, as opposed to just prioritizing different things.
The low end was based on the stabilizing temperature of a solution of water, ice and salt in a proportion lost to time. The benefit was that a water/ice/salt solution will stabilize it’s temperature naturally until the ice melts, making it useful for calibrating something like a thermometer: “ice” can be below the freezing point, but you can use the solution to set a steady baseline: the liquid will be 0°F.
The next steady baseline was body temperature, available to anyone measuring.
The scale was then set so that the freezing and boiling points of water were 180° apart. This was useful because it put them on opposite sides of a dial.
It was before we decided that ten was the ultimate number that couldn’t be beat, so people still played with circular symmetry, thirds and so one.
This meant you could calibrate your thermometer by setting 0 to bring, 100 to your body, and then pushing steam through it and adjusting the offset so that the intervals were right and you correct body temperature variance. Some specific numbers have changed over the years as we adjust the scale to be based on metric.
Not stupid or arbitrary, just prioritizing things we don’t care about so much any more.
Celsius and the other are both based on absolute zero and a very specific change in energy levels in the medium, so it’s ultimately moot. Neither is technically based on what they originally were. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_revision_of_the_SI
THAT’S WHAT IT’S BASED ON?
One of my pet peeves is people thinking units of the past or people in the past were stupid, as opposed to just prioritizing different things.
The low end was based on the stabilizing temperature of a solution of water, ice and salt in a proportion lost to time. The benefit was that a water/ice/salt solution will stabilize it’s temperature naturally until the ice melts, making it useful for calibrating something like a thermometer: “ice” can be below the freezing point, but you can use the solution to set a steady baseline: the liquid will be 0°F.
The next steady baseline was body temperature, available to anyone measuring.
The scale was then set so that the freezing and boiling points of water were 180° apart. This was useful because it put them on opposite sides of a dial.
It was before we decided that ten was the ultimate number that couldn’t be beat, so people still played with circular symmetry, thirds and so one.
This meant you could calibrate your thermometer by setting 0 to bring, 100 to your body, and then pushing steam through it and adjusting the offset so that the intervals were right and you correct body temperature variance. Some specific numbers have changed over the years as we adjust the scale to be based on metric.
Not stupid or arbitrary, just prioritizing things we don’t care about so much any more.
Celsius and the other are both based on absolute zero and a very specific change in energy levels in the medium, so it’s ultimately moot. Neither is technically based on what they originally were.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_revision_of_the_SI
@darthelmet @M0oP0o
Nobody really knows for sure. It’s lost to history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit
Oh sure, it just so happens to line up just so and comes from a time where malt (max saturation of salt in water) was common.
Fun thing though is that due to this its the one thing f is good at. No point salting a road at or below zero f. Yeap that’s it, wooooo