-3
Fahrenheit is exactly what is wrong with USA
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2026
-3 points (48.3% liked)
Showerthoughts
41230 readers
773 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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...