no, Celsius starts at +273.15 K, because that’s where an element we are all dependent on to live and in contact with every day undergoes an important phase transition.
What happens at 0°F?
What happens at 0°F?
why does it matter? Water freezes at 32 degrees f. What happens at 32 degrees C? What happens at 212 degrees C?
Also no, it doesn’t start at +273.15 K, that’s not how number ranges work. If you have a list of numbers between -10 and 10. And you were to sort them, least to most, -10 would be at the bottom, obviously.
you realize that temperature is a measure of the energy within a substance/material right? It’s intrinsically tried to the physics and atomic structure underlying the material substance. That always starts at the lowest temperature point, the point being where it is is just a reference
it starts at +273.15K because that is the lower of the two reference points used in its creation. the Kelvin scale was created later and builds on the Celsius scale. of course lower temps are sorted first, that’s not what matters. it’s why we call these scales “degrees”, after all.
why it matters is because the scale i use every day constantly gets “verified” by passing the zero marker and showing that things outside freeze. that makes it a good reference point that builds its own intuition.
that’s what this is all about, after all: how useful a scale is for everyday use. a scale that is relevant to my needs and that has important events happen on easy-to-remember points of the scale requires very little teaching.
why it matters is because the scale i use every day constantly gets “verified” by passing the zero marker and showing that things outside freeze. that makes it a good reference point that builds its own intuition.
any number is equally as good for an arbitrary reference point. And it can arguably be even more confusing, let’s take a page out of CS acronyms and short hands. GB and GiB (often shortened improperly) GB being 1000, GiB being 1024. Now i feel like i don’t have to explain why this is a bad thing.
1024 is an odd unit, but it’s sequential powers of 2, so it’s trivial to think about. 1000 is a nice unit, but it doesn’t map nicely into storage, or binary strings.
like to me the difference between 0-100 and 32-212 is basically nothing. Sure it’s a weird number, but they’re both numbers so. Really the only proper utility it has is the SI unit meta, and the fact that it maps into kelvin. Outside of that i don’t see why 0 or 32 as the freezing point are any different. It might be more visually pleasing, but like, fahrenheit also takes that one as well, given that the 0f-100f thing is accurate. I feel like they’re just equivalent.
i just don’t see why it matters, like at all. People do much more complicated things on a daily basis. People remember random strings of numbers as passcodes, people remember random strings of letters as for passwords.
idk i feel like it’s just weird to sit here on the internet and complain about how you need water to freeze at 0 degrees, and how it must boil at 100 degrees. When neither of those are like, relevant? For most day to day activities at least. Maybe in the winter, but again, 32.
would it be nicer if fahrenheit suddenly had water freeze at 0f tomorrow, as well as boil at 200f? Probably, but like, i wouldn’t care. It just seems like such an odd thing to care about to me.
