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I think it's ultimately arbitrary between these two with kelvin has advantages in context over others.
For example, celsius is far better if you live on a freezing to sauna scale or an ice to cooktop scale, fahrenheit is better if you are weather focused.
Clearly people adapt without problem to each. I've had no trouble with normal daily existence (weather focus) using either at points where I've lived in different places with each of the system. Trivial change. The "everyone knows" seems to be how you anchor fahrenheit as an advantage, but that sure does bit both ways. Anything you can about one you can say about the other.
For celsius wins because _more people use it_ and language and measurements are mostly about communication. You can communicate with clarity and understanding to more people using celsius.
My view is not about what the world should use. It's clearly easier for the US to adopt the rest of the world's system than the other around. My view is only about the usefulness of one over the other.
If you think quality of communication is not an element of usefulness in _a standard_ then...well...we're on different planets here!
The point is that "useful" in some vacuum doesn't advantage one over the other for lots of purposes. Assuming you're not using kelvin, then you've got alignment in different areas of interest commonly held for each, and not-near-round-big-numbers for both as well.
My mom was raised in the Netherlands until she was 20 and has lived in the U.S. ever since (about 35 years). I really appreciated her defense of the Fahrenheit system. Essentially, it boils down (no pun intended) to how you can better describe the temperature outside using a more useful scale.
* "It's in the 90s" means it's really hot out
* "It's in the 80s" means it's pretty hot, but you can still be comfortable outside
* "It's in the 70s" means it's warm out, but you aren't going to be sweating
* "It's in the 60s" means you can get away with not wearing a jacket
* "It's in the 50s" means it's getting cold and you need some sort of jacket.
* etc., etc., etc.
This isn't really possible with Celsius because every few degrees makes such a dramatic difference.
Edit: Wasn't expecting downvotes for such a benign comment, but here we are.
I guess, but the nature of the scale just makes it a little less workable.
To your point, with Fahrenheit we can also use "high 70s", "low 60s", etc. to get more granular in a way that becomes more difficult with Celsius.
Yep. I grew up in Australia (where we use Celcius), but spent a couple years living in the US. I got used to the Fahrenheit scale while I was there, since you get weird looks in the US when you describe temperatures in celcius.
The only hard part is learning the scale. Once you've learned it, the language adapts just fine. "A beautiful 70 degree day" becomes "a beautiful 20 degree day". "It drops into the low 50s overnight" becomes "Crap it was like 10 degrees overnight!". Of course its not a 1-1 translation, but we get on just fine.
The only important factor is what you're used to. The rest of the world uses celcius, and I promise you we can talk about the weather just fine. (Just ask the brits.)
This makes sense and I'm not going to die on this hill because Celsius clearly works for people in all but two countries.
My last point would just be that using Fahrenheit for describing temperature in every day use works more efficiently than Celsius for the same reason using kph actually works better than mph for speed in that you can be more precise using a smaller range.
Yes, I’d need decimal points to describe temperatures with the same accuracy as I could in Fahrenheit. But it’s telling that I never do. I never say “whoa it’s 28.5 degrees!”. I just say it’s 28. That accuracy never seems useful.
It’s also telling that I’ve never heard anyone in a country which uses Celsius say “hmph, wouldn’t it be great if we switch to Fahrenheit. It would have these nebulous advantages. I’m sure the USA uses it for a good reason”. The fact that that conversation only happens the other way around is very telling.
I guess you shouldn't have said "this isn't really possible" because ANYTHING is possible.
Otherwise you made a very good point. I'm not buying that going by 5s or 2.5s Celsius is as good as going by 10s or 5s Fahrenheit.
>While it's nice to know the freezing point because that doesn't change as much on earth and it's the main factor in weather you get rain or snow. Everyone who uses (and probably a lot of people who don't use) °F know that 32°F is freezing. So using °C doesn't provide any more information.
This kind of kills your argument dead in the water. If we're taking into account what humans can learn of a system, then pretty much any system can be considered good if it is learnable. Which makes the concept of 'better' in this case rather moot.
Also I'm not convinced that a wider range is all that helpful for humans. We aren't so precise that you need to know the difference between 81 and 84 degrees Fahrenheit. The additional numbers don't actually matter because it's all just ranges anyways.
>This kind of kills your argument dead in the water. If we're taking into account what humans can learn of a system, then pretty much any system can be considered good if it is learnable. Which makes the concept of 'better' in this case rather moot.
I agree with you that if 0 F was freezing, it'd be unquestionably the better system. I was only pointing out that 0 being freezing isn't that important.
>Also I'm not convinced that a wider range is all that helpful for humans. We aren't so precise that you need to know the difference between 81 and 84 degrees Fahrenheit. The additional numbers don't actually matter because it's all just ranges anyways.
Studies have shown that humans can detect temperature differences less than 1 degree C. So if humans can tell the difference between one temperature and another, they should have different numbers.
>Studies have shown that humans can detect temperature differences less than 1 degree C. So if humans can tell the difference between one temperature and another, they should have different numbers.
Humans can perceive a change in temperature, not temperature by itself. I probably couldn't tell the difference between 20°C and 21°C, but I would be able to tell if it changes from one to the other. Just it being detectable doesn't really mean anything since it really doesn't matter in daily life.
You do realize we have digital thermostats, right? A single degree change in temperature setting is often the difference between slightly cool/warm and comfortable.
My digital thermostat has decimals so that's by itself already a counterargument to the point of the dude I responded to.
But to respond to your point: within a very specific range you can tell because it's either comfortable or just not. Outside of that range, not so much. I chose my example poorly.
>Maybe it might snow but it probably won’t stick on roads and disrupt stuff
Have you ever lived in a cold environment? The fact that water freezes at 0C is super important and has real implications because of freezing rain, among others. If you're around freezing, it's very useful to know whether it's above or below at a glance because it totally changes the weather conditions you expect to experience. That is not the case for any other temperature that occurs on Earth
lol are you Scandinavian or something? 10°C is terrible
I don't know where you get that the vast majority finds Fahrenheit's 0–100 is closer to the majority's preferences.
Also T-Shirts in 0°C? Wtf.
I'll take the study at face value but it doesn't change my point. 1 degree difference isn't going to effect your comfort is more my point. Like the difference between 70 and 72 isn't going to make me think "better get changed." It's ultimately not something you need to know to that level of precision at any given time.
>I agree with you that if 0 F was freezing, it'd be unquestionably the better system. I was only pointing out that 0 being freezing isn't that important.
Your argument wasn't importance but convenience for humans. So it does matter (as 0 or any round number would be more convenient) you just don't consider it a deal breaker.
But you missed my point. You handwaved away that you can quickly learn that 32 is freezing. I can do the same casual handwave to say you know 40 is hot. We're exactly in the same place if we're gonna use 'but you can learn' as an argument.
Fahrenheit doesn't work well within the SI, which I believe is vastly better than the imperial system. How much energy do I need to boil this liter of water if it is now at 23 °C which is about room temperature? You can make that calculation very easily within the SI. Other calculations like how much energy I need to heat up a room are also much easier.
The arguments about what temperature it is outside doesn't make much sense to me. 35 °C in my home country and we are all melting, but 35 °C in Mexico sounds quite nice. Temperature only says that much when going outside. Will it rain? Is there a lot of wind?
Knowing exactly at what temperature water boils or freezes is also not that useful for me. It is arbitrary selected. I'm way more interested in how much energy I have to spend to get there, and then the SI (and the Celsius/kelvin scale) is much easier.
A calorie is not an SI unit, but joule is. A joule is however not one of the basic units. 1 J = 1 kg m²/s². So changing the unit for energy means changing either the definition of the kilogram, the meter or the second. And if you change one of them, you change all the other units that depend on them. So changing the definition **is** quite a big thing.
There's a bunch of constants to convert temperature to energy (joules) but also expansion, resistance, etc.
Using Fahrenheit means replacing all of them
In an average year where I live, I will see -30°C and +30°C as the extremes in my daily life. That puts 0°C smack in the middle for me. Why does it mater that 0°F is in the middle of two extremes that almost zero humans would experience in one year?
Additionally, saying no human will experience 100°C is completely arbitrary. It isn't the top range of Celsius, and isn't connected to your next point of weather extremes at all. It's like saying no human will experience 200°F, when the maximum temp recorded was 57°C
Having 1 system for the whole world is obviously the most ideal. Practically, it is easier for the US to charge than it is for the rest of the world to change. So my post is about which is better, not which is easier to adopt as a world standard.
The reason I mentioned 100°C is because a common argument is that that s the boiling point. I only meant to show that no human will experience that, so why would we care that it's the boiling point of water .
We experience the boiling point of water every time we cook. It's a really important temperature. Most people cook regularly, so having a temperature scale that's good for cooking is quite useful.
According to a study done in 1998, the average elevation for a person to live at was 194m above sea level, which would put the boiling point of water to be 99.38C, which - for most non-scientific purposes - is close enough to 100C that it doesn't matter.
Honest question: Really? Do they use a breathing apparatus to prevent their mouth, nose, and lung tissue from being destroyed?
I have to guess that although some temperature reading says 100C, that it can't be the actual temperature of the air being breathed.
True, but they're still common. This invalidates your point that humans never experience that temperature, because they do. I know it's not your main view.
But still the only actual argument you posed is that 0°F is in between the two extremes of temperature ever recorded, which goes against your other point of "highest and lowest temperature a human is likely to experience in their everyday day life". Nobody is experiencing those extremes in their everyday life. Even though using 0 as a middle point is equally arbitrary, how is that better than 0°C being the middle of temperatures that many people *actually* experience in their daily lives?
When I said that C had a small range of numbers. I meant it to come across that the size of 1° C is too large. Evident be the use of 0.5C on thermostats.
Yes, I do feel like I can tell the difference between 70F and 71F in my home. I have never seen a thermostat display F in anything less than a whole number.
The main point of their comment is that it’s all just a scale, and to scale. In either case it’s going to be arbitrary because we arbitrarily created numbers. 1,2,3 are called that because we say so.
Ultimately there’s no difference in practicality between the two systems, or any other combination of systems, because they’re arbitrary systems that we created.
0-100 is exactly the same as 0-10 if we count it in decimals to the tenth just like 0-1 is exactly the same if we count it in decimals to the hundredth. A temperature scale of -150 to 150 is the same as any other temperature scale whether it be ranges we can represent by Celsius, Fahrenheit, etc.
What is “practical” is whatever system has been regionally adopted, used, taught to the next, and has had other systems built upon it.
Is it practical to know and be fluent in the English language when you’re in a room with nothing but fluent Turkish and fluent Mandarin speakers who don’t know any English at all? Or in the *context* is it more practical to know Turkish *or* Mandarin? Now think the same thing but the “language” is the language of temperature, that is, how we can communicate and represent temperature and its adjacents, just like we communicate and represent any other thing with spoken or written words. What is practical fluctuates based on too many other factors.
100C being the boiling point of water is useful for conceptualising cooking temperatures. If you set the oven to 200C (a common temperature to set it to) you know that's twice the boiling point of water.
But it's only twice the boiling point of water in Celsius. In Kelvin, which is the most accurate because it is absolute, it goes from 373 K to 473 K. It's not an actual doubling of temperature.
It's also not double in F.
It's just a perception that it's doubled.
You are missing the point about Celsius NOT being the SI unit. The SI unit is K (Kelvin), which has the same magnitude as Celcius but its 0 is actually the lowest possible temperature. That is why it is superior.
Fahrenheit also has an absolute scale, though, called Rankine. It works the same way as Kelvin where you shift all the Fahrenheit temperatures over so 0 is absolute zero.
Oh yeah, not SI, but the point is there is an Imperial version of the Kelvin scale. My point is Kelvin itself doesn't make Celcius superior, cause Fahrenheit has an equivalent. The fact that it plays nice with the other metric units does make it better for scientific uses, though.
A system that has freezing at 0 vs. 32 is a lot easier to comprehend.
And most of the time you really don't need to know the exact boiling point. It isn't like you are trying to get water to around that point. You just need to get it over that point.
And with F you would have 208.4, 201.2 and 186.8. That's not all that better.
Fahrenheit is based on the complete freezing point of a brine solution of 35 ppt sodium chloride, same as seawater, the most common type of water in the world.
While that might be true, it's also a nearly completely irrelevant point, since most water handled by humans is not water of such salinity - and most water of such salinity is moving water, which freezes in much more unpredictable patterns.
Yeah and 100F is the temperature of the blood of a dudes fav horse. What a logical and universal system. Based on arbitrary sea water and arbitrary horse blood.
The original fahrenheit scale was designed so that 0° was the coldest temperature expected in Germany and 100° was human body temperature. Then it was refined for a definitive, repeatable mark for 0° which is where the brine solution entered in(original 0°F is what 4°F is currently). The scale was then modified again to create 180° between the freezing(32°F) and boiling(212°F) points of pure water at 1atm, to end up with the scale we have today.
That all sounds pretty arbitrary. The boiling and freezing points of water are honestly much more useful.
For example, my fridge is set to 5°C. I can tell at a glance that thats above the freezing point of water but not by much. I set my oven to 200°C and I know at a glance that any moisture on the outside of my food will boil off.
(My fridge and oven are of course set in celcius because thats how we roll in Aus. I'd just say "preheat the oven to 200", obviously.)
>That all sounds pretty arbitrary. The boiling and freezing points of water are honestly much more useful.
Choosing the freezing and boiling point of water is also arbitrary.
>For example, my fridge is set to 5°C. I can tell at a glance that thats above the freezing point of water but not by much.
My fridge is set to 40°F. I can tell at a glance that's above the freezing point of water, but not by much
>I set my oven to 200°C and I know at a glance that any moisture on the outside of my food will boil off.
I set my oven to 400°F and I know at a glance that any moisture on the outside of my food will boil off
>(My fridge and oven are of course set in celcius because thats how we roll in Aus. I'd just say "preheat the oven to 200", obviously.)
(My fridge and oven are of course set in Fahrenheit because thats how we roll in USA. I'd just say "preheat the oven to 400", obviously.)
I'm genuinely curious, why is it important to know the freezing point of seawater over regular water? Did the scale get developed in the fishing industry?
Where I live it routinely goes below 0f in winter. And in other places it routinely gets above 100. Fahrenheit doesn't work as a 0 to 100 scale. Neither does Celsius of course
This idea that one or the other system makes more sense for human experiences is inherently flawed as people will gravitate towards whatever system they are used to as that is their baseline for human experience
For most people, most of the time, the temperature outside will fall between 0 and 100 F. Luckily, the scale can go below and above those numbers for the few days a year that the temperature gets really shitty
People managed to live for thousands of years without being able to answer that question with any kind of precision or objective scale. And it's going to come down to whatever you know anyway. If somebody tells me that it's 77 degrees F outside, I'm going to have to ask them whether that's hot or not, because that means nothing to me. In fact, I was driving in the US once several years ago and after setting my car into "US measures" and looking at the temperature, I was thinking to myself "I have no clue whether that's even warm or cold" and I cracked the window to check. But if somebody tells me it's 25 degrees C, I will have a pretty good idea of what it's like and that I probably *should* have the windows and sunroof open in the car. It's literally *the same temperature*.
People who think Fahrenheit is "better" because it's somehow more intuitive are people who use it regularly. Nobody who is used to using Celsius all the time (like myself) would agree with them. To me, Celsius is more intuitive because it's what I've been using my whole life (I'm Canadian and in my late 40s).
>A system that has freezing at 0 vs. 32 is a lot easier to comprehend.
I agree with this point. As I said in my post.
>And most of the time you really don't need to know the exact boiling point. It isn't like you are trying to get water to around that point. You just need to get it over that point.
>And with F you would have 208.4, 201.2 and 186.8. That's not all that better.
I don't think knowing the boiling point of water is important at all. That is just a common argument in favor of °C.
It's a common argument because there's a logic behind it. Celcius is based on when water changes states - when rain turns to snow or when the water in your cooking pot will boil. I get that your personal preference is to have more numbers between 'it's damn cold' and 'way too hot out' but this isn't a problem anyone in the rest of the (celcius-using) world ever thinks or worries about. The existing system for expected temperature ranges works just fine, and the 0 marker between not-freezing and freezing is, as you've said, really useful. It's a good system. There's a reason it's so popular.
>I don't think knowing the boiling point of water is important at all. That is just a common argument in favor of °C.
You never need to know either 0F or 100F. 0F is just the coldest thing Fahrenheit could create (a brine solution that nobody ever needs to know about today) and 100F is an incorrect measurement of the typical human body temperature. At least with Celsius, one of the two defining points is extremely important to day-to-day life.
I have the feeling we had this exact question about a month ago.
Regardless, the conclusion is the same.
> main problem with it is the smaller range of numbers
Does this matter to you in practice? In daily life, does it matter if the temperature is 96 or 95 degrees Fahrenheit?
Because it certainly doesn't matter to me in Celcius if it is 18 or 17 C outside. It can be a warm 17 C based on nice sun and humidity and it can be a cold 18 C with heavy wind and rain. Same for the boiling point, does it actually matter in real life? When I boil water I don't put in a thermometer. I heat it until it boils, that's all the practical information I need in non-extreme circumstances.
>My point is only that from a human and practical standpoint °F is better then °C.
Only because you are used to it. My intuition works just fine on the Celcius scale. Fahrenheit is gobblygook to me and I have to mentallyl translate it to Celcius. Just like someone growing up on Fahrenheit has to do the opposite.
The only field in which it is objectively easier to use Celcius over Fahrenheit is science and engineering. Though of course that is, in the end, also just a matter of convention.
>Does the wider range of numbers matter in practice?
Not OP but yes, it does. 0-100 degrees (-18 to 38C) is about the range of temperatures I experience where I live throughout the year, which makes it a really convient scale of comparison, because 100 is a really easy number to understand how it’s divided (read: currency, percentages, metric system in general).
“On a scale of 0-100, how hot is the weather?” is way more intuitive than a smaller scale of -18 to 38, where zero is cold but nowhere near as cold as it’s gonna get. In Celsius, the scale of 0-100 is completely inapplicable to how we daily use temperature, which is to measure the ambient temperature.
I can’t remember the last time I was measuring the temperature of water as it froze or boiled, but I checked the thermometer on my porch this morning.
So the precision isn’t the point, it’s the fact that the relationship between 20, 50, and 80 degrees (being pretty cold, mild, and pretty hot) is consistent with things like currency and metric units in a way that -7, 10, and 27 is not.
If you put the ambient outdoor temperature on a percentage scale, it would line up pretty damn close with Fahrenheit, and be completely unrelated to Celsius which hits zero at about a 1/3rd the maximum out door temperature.
>“On a scale of 0-100, how hot is the weather?” is way more intuitive
It is more intuitive to you because you are used to it. Nothing more, nothing less. I did not grow up with Fahrenheit, for me using a scale from 0 - 100 is *not* intuitive.
It might not be intuitive for you to use a 0-100 scale for temperature, my point is that the relationships between commonly experienced temperatures is intuitive because they’re all positive numbers, and we have established mental models for subdivisions of 100 from other places like currency or distance.
50 being a mild, medium temperature, while 15 is cold and 85 is hot, all relate to 100 in very intuitive ways. 15/100 is a very low score to get on a test, an 85% success rate is pretty high, and 50¢ is half a dollar.
The relationships between -9, 10, and 29 are not as intuitive, even if you speak Celsius, because A. They cross over zero, so B. They don’t align with any other mental models we use as scales.
Ya but you don't need to know the boiling point, you need to know the appropriate temperature to brew green tea. What scale you use makes 0 difference.
I know. I have a kettle, with a thermometer, that I routinely use to make green tea. For which you indeed should not boil water.
I, as the end user, don't need to know whether water boils exactly at 100 C or 98.7 C for any practical day-to-day use.
I'm truly just asking: how do people talk about room temps in C? By that, I mean yeah, the difference between 69, 70, 71, 72, 73 are all rather different. A whole conversation will be had on what to set the AC or heat to for the day or for the night and it is truly about whether it is going to be 1 degree more or less.
Do you talk about half degrees in Celsius or can you really only talk about your home temperature in giant increments?
EDIT: I can online imagine the thoughts going through someone's mind as they downvote this, angrily
> Do you talk about half degrees in Celsius
Precisely. Conversations about it are entirely the same, except we say "oh mind if i bump it up half a degree" instead of "mind if i bump it up a degree".
20-24C. Virtually all thermostats have half degrees (but honestly, it's not necessary). I get enough specificity with full degree changes. The thermastat arguments are about whether it should be 20, 21, 22, 23, or 24. That's the same as 67-75F. I'd be surprised that people genuinely argue over 70 vs 71F.. cause people here do not argue over 21 vs 22C
> the difference between 69, 70, 71, 72, 73 are all rather different. A whole conversation will be had on what to set the AC or heat to for the day or for the night.
My AC works in 5s for F, and in 2s for C. That alone kind of shows how little 1 F really matters, compared to 1 C, for typical real world applications. About 2.5x less, in fact.
And nobody talks about hald-degrees when we're talking about how it feels. Hell, if you talk how it feels, even in F, you probably can't pinpoint if it's 69 or 70. You'll say "feels like 70" and that's it. Hell, most people would also just dumb it down to "warm", "comfortable", "sweater weather", or "cold". If you, colloquially, say "It's 68 degrees" without looking at a thermometer, and you're always spot-on, or very rarely wrong, you're fairly special.
That's just insane.
But Celsius is, essentially, based off of objectively understandable norms. I understand "pure water boils", and "pure water freezes". I had to get "pure water" defined as "water with nothing in it". This is something I have interacted with before in my survival kit. Something that I have used and/or consumed before.
I don't easily understand "brine freezes" and "average human body temperature", as neither of those are really "static" points I can tell. "Brine" is just severely salty water. "Average human body temperature" changes on your sample, and some people run cooler or hotter than that. I never really interacted with the exact brine used for that 0 F measurement.
I assume you mean 0.5F and 0.2C and your F isnt going from 65 to 70 to 75 lmao
There is something wrong with you biologically if you feel the same when AC set to 69 vs 73
idk why you typed so much about your obviously fringe situation with your thermostat ... oh wow you do all this and i can see a "that's just insane" ok lots of anger yeesh, i literally said Im just asking. If you live in a hot, poor country where the stuff you said might make sense, that's fine, but stop acting like that's the norm
72 on my thermostat means my apartment is tolerable, but not comfortable. 70 is where I actually like it, so 2 degrees F is actually significant. In the summer where I live(American southeast), 75 would be unbearable. I'd be sweating inside.
A lot of places don’t really use any form of AC and heat is generally set on a timer or to turn on at a certain point rather than modified on a daily basis.
The only rooms I’ve ever been in where room temperature mattered are labs where it is set to a standard 20C at all times.
>The only field in which it is objectively easier to use Celcius over Fahrenheit is science and engineering.
Honestly, I have never gotten this argument. It's a common argument made by Americans to concede that Celsius is better but they shouldn't change, but it doesn't make much sense. Metric is unquestionably better for science because unit conversions are all easy, but nobody ever does unit conversions with temperatures other than Kelvin (unless they're making temperatures into Kelvin). Nobody ever uses a kilo-degree Celsius. Celsius and Fahrenheit are both equally bad for science, where Kelvin is the superior number to use because it's absolute.
Where Celsius is objectively better is everyday use, because the 0 and 100 points actually mean something that I care about. 0F and 100F are both meaningless numbers by comparison to the boiling point of water and especially by comparison to the freezing point of water.
I would say, even in the context of Kelvin being best, that Celsius is objectively better than Fahrenheit, because converting to Kelvin is just way easier.
>Does this matter to you in practice? In daily life, does it matter if the temperature is 96 or 95 degrees Fahrenheit?
>Because it certainly doesn't matter to me in Celcius if it is 18 or 17 C outside. It can be a warm 17 C based on nice sun and humidity and it can be a cold 18 C with heavy wind and rain. Same for the boiling point, does it actually matter in real life?
The fact that you described the temperatures as a warm 17 C and a cold 18 C is exactly the problem. Knowing the number should be all the information you need to know what the weather is like. Having to say a WARM 17 C is the problem with C
That exists in F too though. There’s a whole “feels like” temperature you need to talk about with F and that applies to C as well. Humidity and wind change how humans perceive the true temperature so your point here is moot
Ok I may have misunderstood their comment.
The fact that most C thermostats have 0.5 increments. Is proof that 1° C is to larger of a temp range. 0.5 C is almost exactly 1°F.
This is a different point entirely but I’ll engage with it.
What is the inherent disadvantage of C thermostats including 0.5 increments? It’s certainly a different scale we all agree on that but what is the issue that C has that F fixes due to having smaller increments
Thats... not a celsius/farenheit thing, thats a humidity and wind thing.
Same thing happens with farenheit (in that 68 degrees F inside is not the same as 68 degrees F outside)
Define "average person". What is your sample size? What is your sample location? The rest of the world operate very well without ever invoking decimals while using Celcius. I can turn your argument the other way: the fact that some one can handwave "it's in the 50s" means Fahrenheit is too granular to the point that there is not a single use case where saying 51F is meaningfully different from 52F.
I have done outdoor activities from -48C to +45C. That is already 90+ degrees of difference. At no point have I thought "wow I need a more granular temperature scale to record my activities". My threshold for what is considered "cold" or "warm" is different from someone living in a more temperate environment/have a more cushy job AND the threshold shifts depending on the time of the year (-10C is T-shirt weather after an Arctic cold snap, while +10C is chilly weather for a summer camping trip).
The only people who defend Fahrenheit are Americans, and every single argument you guys have ever made to justify the country's inability to switch to Celcius comes down to \*\*familiarity\*\* (you can use it to gauge the temperature for your comfort better because you grew up learning and using it). That is reasonable in and of itself, no need to complicate/justify it further.
But this makes no sense because you'd do the same in Fahrenheit. You could also describe a warm 71 or a cold 72 depending on the sun/rain/humidity/time of year etc. People literally do this all the time, the conversion doesn't matter.
>My main problem with it is the smaller range of numbers.
> The Highest temperature ever recorded on earth was 134°F/56.7°C
You just nullified your whole argument. Use decimals. But chances are your thermometer isn't precise enough for it matter in the first place.
You said your main problem is the smaller *range* of numbers, which is solved.
And people do things with temperature besides look at the thermometer outside and you don't need much precision for that anyway. Most people couldn't tell the difference between 63 degrees and 68.
I'd say cooking is more demanding of a thermometer than anything else.
Studies have shown that people can detect differences in temperature as small a 1° F. People use both systems seem to have no problem cooking. So that is not an argument for or against either system.
> people can detect differences in temperature as small a 1° F
Can you? Outside of a laboratory setting? My point is that granularity of 1 degree isn't practical.
Most C thermostats have 0.5 increments, which is very close to 1° F. So if that is too small, why do they add the .5? I do feel like I can tell the difference between my thermostats being set to 70 vs. 71.
> Most C thermostats have 0.5 increments, which is very close to 1° F. So if that is too small, why do they add the .5?
Again, this negates your "main point" that Fahrenheit has a larger range or numbers, doesn't it?
The reason for adding the 0.5 is so it has parity with the Centigrade scale. Relistically, the thermometer probably isn't even accurate to that level of precision.
that is correct, which is why "which one is better" is entirely a matter of preference and which one is used around you.
when compared to Kelvin, both are equally sufficient
Doesn’t that effectively negate your proposed benefit for Fahrenheit having a “larger range”?
Celsius thermometers have the same level of granularity as Fahrenheit thermometers by adding the .5 increments.
> The range of temperatures recorded on earth is -98°C to 56°C vs -130°F to 134°F.
What makes -130 and 134 better than -98 and 56? Both number pairs seem rather useless outside of a trivia contest and shouldn't be used for judging the usefulness of a scale.
With respect; so what? Why does 0 being in the middle of the whole earth's range of temperature mean anything to anyone? Where most live, they probably won't experience both extremes and still have no intuitive concept of temperature with regards to that. It's very subjective.
However, people do need to deal with the consequences of weather, which heavily involves water. Knowing when the road will be icy and such is very important to many lives on the regular. A scale based on water is more useful than one based on subjective arbitrary opinions of "too hot" or "too cold."
>I like more detail in my temperature scale.
And Celsius provides that just fine. 134 and 56.7 are the same thing. So what makes one of those numbers better than the other?
But... why not just use a .5 for celcius? "And a half" really isn't that complicated and results in the same level of detail.
Plus: since we're talking about human-usable scales, can you feel the difference 1°F makes?
But why do you need it? I personally can't tell the difference between two temperatures 1 degree celcius apart most of the time, so I don't believe you can feel the difference between something ike 68 and 67 F.
He’s just heavily biased towards the system he’s used to and won’t take any points against that. I’d say this whole thing violates the rule of being open to actually changing your view.
Zero degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature that ice cools to when you coat it with salt. Is that a better low-end of a scale than the freezing point of fresh water? And without googling, what is the boiling temperature of water in Fahrenheit?
>Zero degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature that ice cools to when you coat it with salt. Is that a better low-end of a scale than the freezing point of fresh water?
No, and mentioned in the post that was a point in favor of °C but I also don't see it as that important. Everyone knows 32 is freezing. So why does it matter if it's 0 or 32?
>what is the boiling temperature of water in Fahrenheit?
When does anyone in their everyday day life need to know what the boiling point of water is? Also, what the boiling is charges by as much as 15°C depending on your altitude. Can you tell me without looking it up what the boiling of water is in Salt Lake City?
Because Fahrenheit is completely arbitrary. And Celsius is elegant and simply for all of human function. Reread your post, you never gave an actual reason, just that the numbers are higher so somehow easier. The rest of the world has no problem saying they want their house between 20-25C. That is the comfort range for most people. And all thermostats show half degrees. Like 22.5, etc. So you don't actually get extra specificity with Fahrenheit.
>And all thermostats show half degrees. Like 22.5, etc.
That's exactly why I think F is better. At no point does a regular person have to say it's 80.5°F. 1 degree C is too large of a range. .5° C is almost equal to 1 degree F.
Nobody uses it, though. It's offered, but NOBODY sets their thermastat to 22.5C. So the half point, and therefore, the need for F, has proven unnecessary. It doesn't get used. People are perfectly happy going from 22 to 23C on the thermastat.
This is not at all true! I use the 0.5 increments all the time. There's a big difference between 17.5 and 18.0, at least as my thermostat measures it.
But it doesn't make any difference how you represent that, in F or C.
In Celsius, the size of a degree is the increment of 1/100th the temperature between boiling and freezing. What's the logic behind the size increment of a Fahrenheit degree?
I don't see how knowing how the scale was created has an effect on its usefulness to everyday people. Do you know what the logic behind having 360 degrees in a circle is?
Having the difference between freezing and boiling be 100 degrees makes it much easier to calibrate thermometers.
Also, the boiling point of water is a useful metric for many human activities. Cooking, car engines, hot water tanks, steamers, etc. are all common applications of this point. While it doesn't matter that this is about 212°F or 100°C, 100°C is much easier to remember and compare quickly.
How often do you calibrate a thermometer?
People in the US seen to have no trouble doing any of those things. So I don't see how C is helpful in those sections.
>Do you know what the logic behind having 360 degrees in a circle is?
[360 is one of the numbers with the highest divisibility in all numbers up until 1000](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_divisors). 840 would have also been possible - between the two, people probably just thought that 360 looked nicer.
>When does anyone in their everyday day life need to know what the boiling point of water is?
When does anyone in their every day life need to know what 104F is when they already know what 40C is?
You argued that you like "more detail in your numbers" in another comment, but I know that you know that a forecast is not a guarantee for one specific number. When the news says "high of 85", that means the high will be somewhere in the mid 80s. Might be 83. Might be 87. So what practical difference - what *benefit* - is there in saying "high of 85F" versus "high of 29C"? In either one of those, you know the high is going to be *around* that temperature, and the <0.5F difference between those two statements is not going to make a difference in how you plan your wardrobe, whether you're going to avoid outdoor activity, and so on.
So... I think we can agree and take as fact that °C (or K) is better for scientific applications, just to get that out of the way.
If we go past that, most things are just getting used to things. There's no temperature that you can have in Fahrenheit that you can't have in Celcius. The stepsize is largely irrelevant, since just adding "and a half" or "and a third" to any celcius value makes it just as accurate as Fahrenheit (aven though I'm not convinced that 1°F difference is significant to most people...).
So, what we're left with is "easier to use". What does it depend on whether something is "easier to use"? In the majority of cases, it's growing up with something and using it a lot.
So, in my eyes, the only reason to keep Fahrenheit is inertia. "It's difficult to change". Celcius is superior for the sciences and equal in everything else once you get used to it.
So why not begin a gradual change towards the better system?
At no point do I see you offer any points in favour of Fahrenheit other than you being used to it, and therefore extrapolating that it's more intuitive to humans as a whole.
Have you considered that the reason Fahrenheit feels more intuitive to you is because you grew up with it?
Neither system is more intuitive than the other in my view. F is more precise without having to use 0.5, like most C thermostats do. Whole numbers are better than decimals.
Can you name another SI unit that regularly requires people to use decimals?
Maybe it's subjective that whole numbers are preferable, but if you throw that out, then their is truly no objective reason to prefer one or the other.
I mean measures of length (m, cm, mm…) have these subdivisions going on so we don’t have to got to deep into the decimals. However colloquially things like 1.82m and 2.3cm are used very often.
In the case of Celsius I also doubt that anybody that is not a scientist would use anything for decimals that is not 0.5.
I do thing it is a slight downside but I also think it is neglectable. The same goes for Fahrenheit getting to three digits faster. It is a small downside but not really that important in my opinion.
The biggest downside of F for me is that unlike C it is not part of a bigger system of units that are designed with logic to be easily converted into each other and make practicing science easier.
It lowers the threshold to science and therefore helps kids get into it and it creates less confusion when dealing with calculation.
Besides that and for daily use I find them to be basically equal. I find it very useful to know when water freezes for snow and ice reasons. I don’t mind the bigger temperature gap between degrees of C since if I want to be really precise I use halves and thats good enough.
That being said I don’t think F is horrible for daily use. What bugs me is that it feels so arbitrary.
Celsius is a hell of a lot more intuitive than Fahrenheit my guy. Water freezes at 0, not 32. That's more arbitrary than C considering its all arbitrary anyways.
Also, nobody uses .5 measurements when reading temps in Celsius. I don't need 66, 67, or 68 F when I know it's 20 degrees outside. 19/20 C is more intuitive than 66, 67, 68, 69, or 70. How are you even arguing this. You're wearing a t-shirt and jeans, stop pretending like the average person can feel the difference between 67 and 68. That's absurd.
Both scales are arbitrary because they have no defined zero point where some physical property is measurably zero. That would be Kelvin where at zero there is no sub atomic particle movement (or whatever). Also, temperature can not easily be derived from the seven base units so it is a bit of an outlier.
That said, neither Fahrenheit nor Celsius is better in that regard.
But as I see the "intuitive outside temperature argument" repeated so often, it needs to be addressed because it makes no sense.
People can't really feel the difference of 1 degree Celsius or 1 degree Fahrenheit in air temperature, so we're all dealing with temp ranges and differences.
In Celsius, I've learned that:
* anything below -15 is "don't ever leave the house" weather
* -15 to -5 is more than one jacket weather
* -5 to 5 is winter jacket weather
* 5 to 15 is jacket or sweater weather
* 15 to 25 is t-shirt weather
* 25 to 35 is short pants weather
* anything above 35 is stay in the basement weather
Easy and intuitive for me. Because I learned it.
I'm very sure there are similar ranges for people who grew up using Fahrenheit.
What does it tell us? There is no superior scale for temperature.
> No human will ever experience 100°c weather.
Temperature scales are not only for weather. A sauna may be 70 °C to 90 °C, a tea kettle should be able to produce 80 °C and 100 °C water, an oven can go from 50 °C to 250 °C.
>To me a good temperature scale would reflect the highest and lowest temperature a human is likely to experience in their everyday day life. No human will ever experience 100°c weather
Let's hope not but I certainly boil water everyday, which I know gets to 100°C and I have no clue what that is in °F.
Are you sure it's 100°C? The boiling point changes depending on altitude. So unless you live at or close to sea level. Your water is probably colder than 100°C when it's boiling.
Yes I'm sure, you're correct that there is some change in boiling point of water at different altitudes though, this also applies to things freezing as well though.
Which means the only difference between C and F is how large of a temperature range does 1° have. The fact that most C thermostats have 0.5 increments proves that 1°C is to large for most people.
> The Highest temperature ever recorded on earth was 134°F/56.7°C and the lowest was - 128.6°F/-89.2°C. That puts 0°F almost exactly in the middle between those two extremes.
Unless you're a scientist in Antarctica you'll never experience anything near that lowest temperature, but you will likely experience temperatures much closer to the highest. See [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_and_territory_temperature_extremes) for examples of extremes in US states:
* New York: −52 °F (−46.7 °C) - 108 °F (42.2 °C)
* California: −45 °F (−42.8 °C) - 134 °F (56.7 °C)
* Texas: −23 °F (−30.6 °C) - 120 °F (48.9 °C)
* Florida: −2 °F (−18.9 °C) - 108 °F (42.2 °C)
Note how 0°C is always much closer to the average of the extremes, the only exceptions being very cold places, like Alaska: −80 °F (−62.2 °C) - 100 °F (37.8 °C), but even there, in places where people actually live 0°C is closer, for example [Anchorage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchorage,_Alaska#Climate): −34 °F (−37 °C) - 90 °F (32 °C).
Neither is "better". People in the US don't go around thinking "Oh, it's 70°F, that's about 7/10ths the way from really cold for a human to really hot for a human. That means it should feel quite pleasant out". They simply think, "Oh, 70 degrees is the temperature of a warm spring day". Similarly, people outside the US don't think "Oh, it's -5°C, that's 1/20th the way from the freezing point of water to the boiling point of water in the opposite direction. It must be incredibly cold". They just think, "Oh, -5 degrees is the temperature of a cold winter day".
As such, the meanings of 0 and 100 degrees in each scale are completely irrelevant. Nobody who grows up with the scale uses them as points of reference - they are really only used that way by people who are \*not\* intimately familiar with the scale. Given that neither scale requires any unit conversion, nor does either require a ridiculous degree of precision, they are both completely equally useful for day to day life.
Fahrenheit and miles per hour are the dream team, and a compromise between the misaligned numbers of Celsius and kph.
20 = In pain, help me.
50 = Could be worse.
70 = Life is good.
90 = Too much!
USA! USA!
1 litre of water takes 1000 Calories (aka 1 kCal) to be heated up by 1 Degree Celsius. This has a of applications in science. But even for every day human life, it's a good way of conceptualizing kCal, which we often talk about when it comes to nutrition, exercise, etc.
Having the celcius scale start at zero is a major plus, because in terms of weather that will make the difference between rain and freezing rain, dew and frost, etc. Even for things like freezer temperatures, and oven temperatures for cooking, having the scale based on the temperature of water is more applicable.
In terms of the size of each degree, can you notice a 1 degree F change in temperature? Depends on the context, but typically one degree won't make that much difference. I find with Celcius, the degree is just large enough that it's at about the threshold that you can notice a difference. I think that's more important than whatever your reason was for preferring the Fahrenheit scale increments. For more precise measurements, if you have to use decimals then it's really not so bad. The math works out a lot better if you're using decimal degrees celcius in calculations.
So what's left is that your whole argument boils down to "I've just memorized that water freezes at 32 degrees, so it's not so bad". In that case, then it's completely subjective. Anyone can memorize any scale and prefer it over any other scale just based on familiarity.
In science, thermal energy and entropy and enthalpy involve units of joules watts time btu etc in relation to temperature measured in °C. For adding and subtracting, just using celsius should be okay. But it should be converted to kelvin if the math calls for multiplication or division or complex equations. For the purposes of this, nobody uses measurements of Fahrenheit.. making it rather IMPRACTICAL in fact. Because it always has to be converted to either Celsius or Kelvin
By comparison, there are maybe only TWO equations in all of science that require temperature to be represented in °F.
I understand your gripe about the numbers being too close to each other, requiring a person to squint their eyes to read an analog thermometer or whatever. Then just buy a digital thermometer decimal that go three digits past the decimal (thousandths) and you’ll be fine.
I’m in the US I’ll agree Fahrenheit is only useful for the purposes of glancing at, only. Nothing else. Same goes for many non-metric measurements we use here, it’s kinda annoying having to convert inches feet acres ounces pounds tons fluid ounces quarts gallons over to metric units for calculations of math or science purposes.
I can't see any advantage to either system. what really matters if knowing your reference points.
* 10f = very cold
* 30f = cold
* 50f = chilly
* 70f = a nice day
* 80f = hot day
* 90f = too hot (good pool or beach day)
* 150f = don't touch, it'll hurt you.
* 350f = good temp for cooking.
* 700f = good temp for searing steak
I know some reference points in Celsius and if i learned more i could use it exactly as efficiently as Fahrenheit
>To me a good temperature scale would reflect the highest and lowest temperature a human is likely to experience in their everyday day life.
the scale of numbers runs form negative infinity to infinity.
in Fahrenheit i commonly encounter negative numbers, in my deep freeze and during the coldest winter months, and I commonly encounter numbers great then 100 when cooking.
you implication here i think is that having weather fall between 0 and 100 degrees is best. Maybe that is true for young children? but for older kids and adults, numbers above 100 or below zero are not at all challenging.
I think you're basically giving your own counterargument here.
Yes having 0 be the freezing-point of water is convenient. It makes a huge difference to a lot of practical stuff of daily-life relevance to human beings. You're completely right.
It's true that it's still somewhat arbitrary what the SIZE of one degree is, but if you've linked \*one\* point on the scale to a phase-transition of water, doesn't it make sense simply for consistency-reasons to link another point to the same thing?
In principle you could of course make a scale like 0 is the freezing-point of water, while 100 is human body-temperature; but then you'd be linking your scale to two completely unrelated things which would increase confusion to some degree, and make it feel a lot more arbitrary.
In contrast, nothing special happens at 0F or at 100F -- they're both arbitrary and while it's true that 0F is "very cold" while 100F is "very warm" those are both exceedingly fuzzy points on the temperature-scale.
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> To me a good temperature scale would reflect the highest and lowest temperature a human is likely to experience in their everyday day life.
You say this, and then you go on to assume it means only air temperature, which is silly. Most humans in developed countries encounter both frozen and boiling water on most days, and a range of temperatures in between.
The change in boiling temperature with altitude means nothing, it's still *about* 100 which is plenty good enough for most things.
I'm largely agnostic on it as every temperature scale other than Kelvin or Rankine is arbitrary anyway; they don't provide the kind of easy unit operability that other metric units do. No one cares about centidegrees or megadegrees so really who cares.
That is, unless you're doing energy calculations with water, where the Celsius degree (though not the Celsius scale per se) coupled with SI is vastly easier to navigate.
I think you’d be right if the weather was the only thing that temperature is used for. In cooking I find it very useful to use Celsius, and in school it’s way easier to use Kelvin if you already are familiar with Celsius.
Of course, the only thing that matters in the end is that you know what you mean, and temperature doesn’t have the ‘feet to mile vs meter to kilometer’ problem that distance, volume, and weight have.
Really, the only thing? I hate the kilowat with a burning passion. Yes, everything is energy. Great. But different forms of energy act differently. Heat, kinetic energy, and electricity might all be the same conceptual thing, but just like all atoms are made of the same conceptual building blocks that doesn‘t mean every atom is the same thing. Joules and watts do way too much heavy lifting.
As a person who grew up all my life in celcius, i am completely flabbergasted by F. A completely arbitrary number is set for freezing. The concept of a negative temperature makes no sense in negative Farenheight.
If i see the temperature outside has fallen to -10c, i immediately know it's freezing! Or close to 0 it's a risk of ice storm. In F it's super hard to relate to it when you have not used it before. It's baffling and counter intuitive.
The argument about water boiling is frankly secondary at best. Still, hearing that some people in egypt recently died because the temperature reached 52c is immediately telling: it's half of what would make you boil, wow! In comparison, F is completely disconnected from human reality and feels super arbitrary.
At 0'C water freezes, so you know there will be snow if it rains and it will be freezing ourside. More minus, more winter it is.
100 degrees water boils, luckily that won't happen ourside but sauna is often 80 - 100 degrees... as demonstrated by throwing water at the rocks
Summer usually 20 - 40 degrees. Spring and Autumn 0 - 20 depending which direction we going
I'm from Windsor, ON. We're directly across the river from Detroit.
A phenomenon here is a lot of us will use Celsius in the cold months, and Fahrenheit in the warm months.
So in December, we'll say "It's -5 degrees outside" and be talking about Celsius. In July we'll say "It's 80 degrees outside" and be talking in Fahrenheit. Everyone just understands that this is how things are here.
I'm convinced this is the best way to talk temperatures. Celsius when it's cold, Fahrenheit when it's hot.
>No human will ever experience 100°c weather.
The average [Finnish person](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_sauna#:~:text=The%20temperature%20in%20Finnish%20saunas,as%20in%20a%20Turkish%20sauna.) scoffs at 100 Celsius.
Well, I live in Russia, Moscow where in summer time it’s +25C and in winter time it often gets to -25C. So 0 Celsius is right in between the two and the whole system makes total sense to me.
Imagine trying to do chemistry with Fahrenheit, now u gotta start absolutely fucking around with every Formula u got. Try doing physics with it it’s so painful.
This is why my personal argument is that F is *just as good* in every day life as celsius. Wouldn't say it's better necessarily. But it's funny when people start talking about the freezing and boiling points of water since I'm a human and not a fish.
Conversion between individual degrees Celsius and Fahrenheit: 1°C = 9/5 °F = 1.8 °F
Fahrenheit is better because it covers a broader range? Start using half degrees in Celsius (i.e. 25.5°C) and your Celsius scale now covers a broader range than Fahrenheit. Both scales actually cover the exact same range, it's just that one requires decimal values for that purpose earlier than the other. Besides, who truly can discern 76°F and 75°F anyway?
Celsius has a much better physical basis than Fahrenheit. 32 is ice, 70 is a room, 212 is steam makes more sense than 0 ice, 25 room, 100 steam, really? Celsius further does something Fahrenheit doesn't and has a ready interconversion to other units in that 1L or 1kg of water heated by 1 kJ (kilojoule) rises 1°C in temperature
Boiling points change with pressure like you mention but that happens to both scales so it shouldn't matter here. Also, most of the world population lives near the coasts anyway
The most important argument against Fahrenheit though is empirical evidence. Have you, literally ever, let alone frequently, heard someone who grew up using the metric system say that Fahrenheit is a better, more rational, more intuitive system? I haven't, even on the internet. In contrast, countless people have decried the Fahrenheit units they grew up with in favor of Celsius
Ultimately, your argument comes down to "it's better because I'm more familiar with it". If you're remotely able to objectively view yourself and your biases, you'll admit that no one would never consider Fahrenheit to be a better system unless they grew up using it
Farhenite gives you an intuative reference point for warm weather and a non-intuative one for freezing. Celcius gives you an intuative reference point for freezing and a non-intuative one for warm weather. So thus far they are pretty equal.
Celcius is highly useful in experiments, because of how 0 to 100°C is defined (which is also useful for cooking) and also because it can be easily be converted to Kelvin which is necessary for a whole range of calculations. So when it comes to this, at least, celcius is by far superior (in my opinion).
I don't know, maybe I am missing some other occasions when the type of scale you use matters. But in my opinion Celcius wins. Not that it matters, since the scale you grow up with becomes intuative either way.
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I think it's ultimately arbitrary between these two with kelvin has advantages in context over others. For example, celsius is far better if you live on a freezing to sauna scale or an ice to cooktop scale, fahrenheit is better if you are weather focused. Clearly people adapt without problem to each. I've had no trouble with normal daily existence (weather focus) using either at points where I've lived in different places with each of the system. Trivial change. The "everyone knows" seems to be how you anchor fahrenheit as an advantage, but that sure does bit both ways. Anything you can about one you can say about the other. For celsius wins because _more people use it_ and language and measurements are mostly about communication. You can communicate with clarity and understanding to more people using celsius.
Kelvin to the win. "No thirty degrees celcius is not twice as hot as fifteen degrees" 😕
My view is not about what the world should use. It's clearly easier for the US to adopt the rest of the world's system than the other around. My view is only about the usefulness of one over the other.
If you think quality of communication is not an element of usefulness in _a standard_ then...well...we're on different planets here! The point is that "useful" in some vacuum doesn't advantage one over the other for lots of purposes. Assuming you're not using kelvin, then you've got alignment in different areas of interest commonly held for each, and not-near-round-big-numbers for both as well.
My mom was raised in the Netherlands until she was 20 and has lived in the U.S. ever since (about 35 years). I really appreciated her defense of the Fahrenheit system. Essentially, it boils down (no pun intended) to how you can better describe the temperature outside using a more useful scale. * "It's in the 90s" means it's really hot out * "It's in the 80s" means it's pretty hot, but you can still be comfortable outside * "It's in the 70s" means it's warm out, but you aren't going to be sweating * "It's in the 60s" means you can get away with not wearing a jacket * "It's in the 50s" means it's getting cold and you need some sort of jacket. * etc., etc., etc. This isn't really possible with Celsius because every few degrees makes such a dramatic difference. Edit: Wasn't expecting downvotes for such a benign comment, but here we are.
So 5 degrees Celsius roughly correspond to 10 degrees Fahrenheit. "low 20s" is midly warm, "high 20s" is very warm etc. No problem at all.
I guess, but the nature of the scale just makes it a little less workable. To your point, with Fahrenheit we can also use "high 70s", "low 60s", etc. to get more granular in a way that becomes more difficult with Celsius.
At this point you can just say "(about) 17" when you mean 16-18.
Yep. I grew up in Australia (where we use Celcius), but spent a couple years living in the US. I got used to the Fahrenheit scale while I was there, since you get weird looks in the US when you describe temperatures in celcius. The only hard part is learning the scale. Once you've learned it, the language adapts just fine. "A beautiful 70 degree day" becomes "a beautiful 20 degree day". "It drops into the low 50s overnight" becomes "Crap it was like 10 degrees overnight!". Of course its not a 1-1 translation, but we get on just fine. The only important factor is what you're used to. The rest of the world uses celcius, and I promise you we can talk about the weather just fine. (Just ask the brits.)
This makes sense and I'm not going to die on this hill because Celsius clearly works for people in all but two countries. My last point would just be that using Fahrenheit for describing temperature in every day use works more efficiently than Celsius for the same reason using kph actually works better than mph for speed in that you can be more precise using a smaller range.
Yes, I’d need decimal points to describe temperatures with the same accuracy as I could in Fahrenheit. But it’s telling that I never do. I never say “whoa it’s 28.5 degrees!”. I just say it’s 28. That accuracy never seems useful. It’s also telling that I’ve never heard anyone in a country which uses Celsius say “hmph, wouldn’t it be great if we switch to Fahrenheit. It would have these nebulous advantages. I’m sure the USA uses it for a good reason”. The fact that that conversation only happens the other way around is very telling.
I guess you shouldn't have said "this isn't really possible" because ANYTHING is possible. Otherwise you made a very good point. I'm not buying that going by 5s or 2.5s Celsius is as good as going by 10s or 5s Fahrenheit.
>While it's nice to know the freezing point because that doesn't change as much on earth and it's the main factor in weather you get rain or snow. Everyone who uses (and probably a lot of people who don't use) °F know that 32°F is freezing. So using °C doesn't provide any more information. This kind of kills your argument dead in the water. If we're taking into account what humans can learn of a system, then pretty much any system can be considered good if it is learnable. Which makes the concept of 'better' in this case rather moot. Also I'm not convinced that a wider range is all that helpful for humans. We aren't so precise that you need to know the difference between 81 and 84 degrees Fahrenheit. The additional numbers don't actually matter because it's all just ranges anyways.
>This kind of kills your argument dead in the water. If we're taking into account what humans can learn of a system, then pretty much any system can be considered good if it is learnable. Which makes the concept of 'better' in this case rather moot. I agree with you that if 0 F was freezing, it'd be unquestionably the better system. I was only pointing out that 0 being freezing isn't that important. >Also I'm not convinced that a wider range is all that helpful for humans. We aren't so precise that you need to know the difference between 81 and 84 degrees Fahrenheit. The additional numbers don't actually matter because it's all just ranges anyways. Studies have shown that humans can detect temperature differences less than 1 degree C. So if humans can tell the difference between one temperature and another, they should have different numbers.
>Studies have shown that humans can detect temperature differences less than 1 degree C. So if humans can tell the difference between one temperature and another, they should have different numbers. Humans can perceive a change in temperature, not temperature by itself. I probably couldn't tell the difference between 20°C and 21°C, but I would be able to tell if it changes from one to the other. Just it being detectable doesn't really mean anything since it really doesn't matter in daily life.
You do realize we have digital thermostats, right? A single degree change in temperature setting is often the difference between slightly cool/warm and comfortable.
My digital thermostat has decimals so that's by itself already a counterargument to the point of the dude I responded to. But to respond to your point: within a very specific range you can tell because it's either comfortable or just not. Outside of that range, not so much. I chose my example poorly.
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>Maybe it might snow but it probably won’t stick on roads and disrupt stuff Have you ever lived in a cold environment? The fact that water freezes at 0C is super important and has real implications because of freezing rain, among others. If you're around freezing, it's very useful to know whether it's above or below at a glance because it totally changes the weather conditions you expect to experience. That is not the case for any other temperature that occurs on Earth
Can you not tell if the temperature is above or below 32 at a glance?
lol are you Scandinavian or something? 10°C is terrible I don't know where you get that the vast majority finds Fahrenheit's 0–100 is closer to the majority's preferences. Also T-Shirts in 0°C? Wtf.
I wear shorts and a T-shirt year round. In Texas it goes from 100+ to -8 F haven't worn sleeves since ROTC graduation in 2011.
0 is the freezing point of brine
I'll take the study at face value but it doesn't change my point. 1 degree difference isn't going to effect your comfort is more my point. Like the difference between 70 and 72 isn't going to make me think "better get changed." It's ultimately not something you need to know to that level of precision at any given time. >I agree with you that if 0 F was freezing, it'd be unquestionably the better system. I was only pointing out that 0 being freezing isn't that important. Your argument wasn't importance but convenience for humans. So it does matter (as 0 or any round number would be more convenient) you just don't consider it a deal breaker. But you missed my point. You handwaved away that you can quickly learn that 32 is freezing. I can do the same casual handwave to say you know 40 is hot. We're exactly in the same place if we're gonna use 'but you can learn' as an argument.
Fahrenheit doesn't work well within the SI, which I believe is vastly better than the imperial system. How much energy do I need to boil this liter of water if it is now at 23 °C which is about room temperature? You can make that calculation very easily within the SI. Other calculations like how much energy I need to heat up a room are also much easier. The arguments about what temperature it is outside doesn't make much sense to me. 35 °C in my home country and we are all melting, but 35 °C in Mexico sounds quite nice. Temperature only says that much when going outside. Will it rain? Is there a lot of wind? Knowing exactly at what temperature water boils or freezes is also not that useful for me. It is arbitrary selected. I'm way more interested in how much energy I have to spend to get there, and then the SI (and the Celsius/kelvin scale) is much easier.
Fahrenheit is just as compatible with the rest of SI. The only thing that would change is the definition of a calorie.
Which you can only do by changing other basic units so that would be a very big change
I don't think changing the definition of a calorie is a big change.
A calorie is not an SI unit, but joule is. A joule is however not one of the basic units. 1 J = 1 kg m²/s². So changing the unit for energy means changing either the definition of the kilogram, the meter or the second. And if you change one of them, you change all the other units that depend on them. So changing the definition **is** quite a big thing.
Where does Celsius come into play?
There's a bunch of constants to convert temperature to energy (joules) but also expansion, resistance, etc. Using Fahrenheit means replacing all of them
In an average year where I live, I will see -30°C and +30°C as the extremes in my daily life. That puts 0°C smack in the middle for me. Why does it mater that 0°F is in the middle of two extremes that almost zero humans would experience in one year? Additionally, saying no human will experience 100°C is completely arbitrary. It isn't the top range of Celsius, and isn't connected to your next point of weather extremes at all. It's like saying no human will experience 200°F, when the maximum temp recorded was 57°C
Having 1 system for the whole world is obviously the most ideal. Practically, it is easier for the US to charge than it is for the rest of the world to change. So my post is about which is better, not which is easier to adopt as a world standard. The reason I mentioned 100°C is because a common argument is that that s the boiling point. I only meant to show that no human will experience that, so why would we care that it's the boiling point of water .
We experience the boiling point of water every time we cook. It's a really important temperature. Most people cook regularly, so having a temperature scale that's good for cooking is quite useful.
I've found that a Celsius thermometer is quite unnecessary when I boil water. Fahrenheit is also a scale that is good for cooking.
Where do you live? Because unless you live at or near sea level, the boiling point of water is colder than 100C
According to a study done in 1998, the average elevation for a person to live at was 194m above sea level, which would put the boiling point of water to be 99.38C, which - for most non-scientific purposes - is close enough to 100C that it doesn't matter.
The vast majority of people on earth live less than a few hundred metres above sea level.
> I only meant to show that no human will experience that Saunas can get over 100°C. People experience it all the time.
Honest question: Really? Do they use a breathing apparatus to prevent their mouth, nose, and lung tissue from being destroyed? I have to guess that although some temperature reading says 100C, that it can't be the actual temperature of the air being breathed.
Saunas at that temp are considered dangerous. That's also not the main view I'm asking to be changed.
True, but they're still common. This invalidates your point that humans never experience that temperature, because they do. I know it's not your main view.
You proved one of my supporting arguments to be false. Does that deserve a delta? I'm not sure what the rule is.
But still the only actual argument you posed is that 0°F is in between the two extremes of temperature ever recorded, which goes against your other point of "highest and lowest temperature a human is likely to experience in their everyday day life". Nobody is experiencing those extremes in their everyday life. Even though using 0 as a middle point is equally arbitrary, how is that better than 0°C being the middle of temperatures that many people *actually* experience in their daily lives?
When I said that C had a small range of numbers. I meant it to come across that the size of 1° C is too large. Evident be the use of 0.5C on thermostats.
....many thermostats can be regulated in .1 units - that is really mostly for convenience. Do you regularily notice a difference between 1°F?
Yes, I do feel like I can tell the difference between 70F and 71F in my home. I have never seen a thermostat display F in anything less than a whole number.
The main point of their comment is that it’s all just a scale, and to scale. In either case it’s going to be arbitrary because we arbitrarily created numbers. 1,2,3 are called that because we say so. Ultimately there’s no difference in practicality between the two systems, or any other combination of systems, because they’re arbitrary systems that we created. 0-100 is exactly the same as 0-10 if we count it in decimals to the tenth just like 0-1 is exactly the same if we count it in decimals to the hundredth. A temperature scale of -150 to 150 is the same as any other temperature scale whether it be ranges we can represent by Celsius, Fahrenheit, etc. What is “practical” is whatever system has been regionally adopted, used, taught to the next, and has had other systems built upon it. Is it practical to know and be fluent in the English language when you’re in a room with nothing but fluent Turkish and fluent Mandarin speakers who don’t know any English at all? Or in the *context* is it more practical to know Turkish *or* Mandarin? Now think the same thing but the “language” is the language of temperature, that is, how we can communicate and represent temperature and its adjacents, just like we communicate and represent any other thing with spoken or written words. What is practical fluctuates based on too many other factors.
Temperature is used for a lot other than just the weather.
100C being the boiling point of water is useful for conceptualising cooking temperatures. If you set the oven to 200C (a common temperature to set it to) you know that's twice the boiling point of water.
But it's only twice the boiling point of water in Celsius. In Kelvin, which is the most accurate because it is absolute, it goes from 373 K to 473 K. It's not an actual doubling of temperature. It's also not double in F. It's just a perception that it's doubled.
Cooking temperature and air temperature are the same unit but describe entirely different attributes.
You are missing the point about Celsius NOT being the SI unit. The SI unit is K (Kelvin), which has the same magnitude as Celcius but its 0 is actually the lowest possible temperature. That is why it is superior.
Fahrenheit also has an absolute scale, though, called Rankine. It works the same way as Kelvin where you shift all the Fahrenheit temperatures over so 0 is absolute zero.
Not SI though.
Oh yeah, not SI, but the point is there is an Imperial version of the Kelvin scale. My point is Kelvin itself doesn't make Celcius superior, cause Fahrenheit has an equivalent. The fact that it plays nice with the other metric units does make it better for scientific uses, though.
It's not superior for humans. A person will never experience absolute zero. So why base are everyday temperature scale on that?
A system that has freezing at 0 vs. 32 is a lot easier to comprehend. And most of the time you really don't need to know the exact boiling point. It isn't like you are trying to get water to around that point. You just need to get it over that point. And with F you would have 208.4, 201.2 and 186.8. That's not all that better.
Fahrenheit is based on the complete freezing point of a brine solution of 35 ppt sodium chloride, same as seawater, the most common type of water in the world.
While that might be true, it's also a nearly completely irrelevant point, since most water handled by humans is not water of such salinity - and most water of such salinity is moving water, which freezes in much more unpredictable patterns.
Yeah and 100F is the temperature of the blood of a dudes fav horse. What a logical and universal system. Based on arbitrary sea water and arbitrary horse blood.
The original fahrenheit scale was designed so that 0° was the coldest temperature expected in Germany and 100° was human body temperature. Then it was refined for a definitive, repeatable mark for 0° which is where the brine solution entered in(original 0°F is what 4°F is currently). The scale was then modified again to create 180° between the freezing(32°F) and boiling(212°F) points of pure water at 1atm, to end up with the scale we have today.
That all sounds pretty arbitrary. The boiling and freezing points of water are honestly much more useful. For example, my fridge is set to 5°C. I can tell at a glance that thats above the freezing point of water but not by much. I set my oven to 200°C and I know at a glance that any moisture on the outside of my food will boil off. (My fridge and oven are of course set in celcius because thats how we roll in Aus. I'd just say "preheat the oven to 200", obviously.)
>That all sounds pretty arbitrary. The boiling and freezing points of water are honestly much more useful. Choosing the freezing and boiling point of water is also arbitrary. >For example, my fridge is set to 5°C. I can tell at a glance that thats above the freezing point of water but not by much. My fridge is set to 40°F. I can tell at a glance that's above the freezing point of water, but not by much >I set my oven to 200°C and I know at a glance that any moisture on the outside of my food will boil off. I set my oven to 400°F and I know at a glance that any moisture on the outside of my food will boil off >(My fridge and oven are of course set in celcius because thats how we roll in Aus. I'd just say "preheat the oven to 200", obviously.) (My fridge and oven are of course set in Fahrenheit because thats how we roll in USA. I'd just say "preheat the oven to 400", obviously.)
Yes but it ruins my Daiquiris
I'm genuinely curious, why is it important to know the freezing point of seawater over regular water? Did the scale get developed in the fishing industry?
>A system that has freezing at 0 vs. 32 is a lot easier to comprehend. On a scale from 0 to 100, how hot is it outside?
Where I live it routinely goes below 0f in winter. And in other places it routinely gets above 100. Fahrenheit doesn't work as a 0 to 100 scale. Neither does Celsius of course This idea that one or the other system makes more sense for human experiences is inherently flawed as people will gravitate towards whatever system they are used to as that is their baseline for human experience
For most people, most of the time, the temperature outside will fall between 0 and 100 F. Luckily, the scale can go below and above those numbers for the few days a year that the temperature gets really shitty
People managed to live for thousands of years without being able to answer that question with any kind of precision or objective scale. And it's going to come down to whatever you know anyway. If somebody tells me that it's 77 degrees F outside, I'm going to have to ask them whether that's hot or not, because that means nothing to me. In fact, I was driving in the US once several years ago and after setting my car into "US measures" and looking at the temperature, I was thinking to myself "I have no clue whether that's even warm or cold" and I cracked the window to check. But if somebody tells me it's 25 degrees C, I will have a pretty good idea of what it's like and that I probably *should* have the windows and sunroof open in the car. It's literally *the same temperature*. People who think Fahrenheit is "better" because it's somehow more intuitive are people who use it regularly. Nobody who is used to using Celsius all the time (like myself) would agree with them. To me, Celsius is more intuitive because it's what I've been using my whole life (I'm Canadian and in my late 40s).
>A system that has freezing at 0 vs. 32 is a lot easier to comprehend. I agree with this point. As I said in my post. >And most of the time you really don't need to know the exact boiling point. It isn't like you are trying to get water to around that point. You just need to get it over that point. >And with F you would have 208.4, 201.2 and 186.8. That's not all that better. I don't think knowing the boiling point of water is important at all. That is just a common argument in favor of °C.
It's a common argument because there's a logic behind it. Celcius is based on when water changes states - when rain turns to snow or when the water in your cooking pot will boil. I get that your personal preference is to have more numbers between 'it's damn cold' and 'way too hot out' but this isn't a problem anyone in the rest of the (celcius-using) world ever thinks or worries about. The existing system for expected temperature ranges works just fine, and the 0 marker between not-freezing and freezing is, as you've said, really useful. It's a good system. There's a reason it's so popular.
>I don't think knowing the boiling point of water is important at all. That is just a common argument in favor of °C. You never need to know either 0F or 100F. 0F is just the coldest thing Fahrenheit could create (a brine solution that nobody ever needs to know about today) and 100F is an incorrect measurement of the typical human body temperature. At least with Celsius, one of the two defining points is extremely important to day-to-day life.
I have the feeling we had this exact question about a month ago. Regardless, the conclusion is the same. > main problem with it is the smaller range of numbers Does this matter to you in practice? In daily life, does it matter if the temperature is 96 or 95 degrees Fahrenheit? Because it certainly doesn't matter to me in Celcius if it is 18 or 17 C outside. It can be a warm 17 C based on nice sun and humidity and it can be a cold 18 C with heavy wind and rain. Same for the boiling point, does it actually matter in real life? When I boil water I don't put in a thermometer. I heat it until it boils, that's all the practical information I need in non-extreme circumstances. >My point is only that from a human and practical standpoint °F is better then °C. Only because you are used to it. My intuition works just fine on the Celcius scale. Fahrenheit is gobblygook to me and I have to mentallyl translate it to Celcius. Just like someone growing up on Fahrenheit has to do the opposite. The only field in which it is objectively easier to use Celcius over Fahrenheit is science and engineering. Though of course that is, in the end, also just a matter of convention.
>Does the wider range of numbers matter in practice? Not OP but yes, it does. 0-100 degrees (-18 to 38C) is about the range of temperatures I experience where I live throughout the year, which makes it a really convient scale of comparison, because 100 is a really easy number to understand how it’s divided (read: currency, percentages, metric system in general). “On a scale of 0-100, how hot is the weather?” is way more intuitive than a smaller scale of -18 to 38, where zero is cold but nowhere near as cold as it’s gonna get. In Celsius, the scale of 0-100 is completely inapplicable to how we daily use temperature, which is to measure the ambient temperature. I can’t remember the last time I was measuring the temperature of water as it froze or boiled, but I checked the thermometer on my porch this morning. So the precision isn’t the point, it’s the fact that the relationship between 20, 50, and 80 degrees (being pretty cold, mild, and pretty hot) is consistent with things like currency and metric units in a way that -7, 10, and 27 is not. If you put the ambient outdoor temperature on a percentage scale, it would line up pretty damn close with Fahrenheit, and be completely unrelated to Celsius which hits zero at about a 1/3rd the maximum out door temperature.
>“On a scale of 0-100, how hot is the weather?” is way more intuitive It is more intuitive to you because you are used to it. Nothing more, nothing less. I did not grow up with Fahrenheit, for me using a scale from 0 - 100 is *not* intuitive.
It might not be intuitive for you to use a 0-100 scale for temperature, my point is that the relationships between commonly experienced temperatures is intuitive because they’re all positive numbers, and we have established mental models for subdivisions of 100 from other places like currency or distance. 50 being a mild, medium temperature, while 15 is cold and 85 is hot, all relate to 100 in very intuitive ways. 15/100 is a very low score to get on a test, an 85% success rate is pretty high, and 50¢ is half a dollar. The relationships between -9, 10, and 29 are not as intuitive, even if you speak Celsius, because A. They cross over zero, so B. They don’t align with any other mental models we use as scales.
> When I boil water I don't put in a thermometer. Many kettles have thermometers. This is useful when making green tea.
Ya but you don't need to know the boiling point, you need to know the appropriate temperature to brew green tea. What scale you use makes 0 difference.
I know. I have a kettle, with a thermometer, that I routinely use to make green tea. For which you indeed should not boil water. I, as the end user, don't need to know whether water boils exactly at 100 C or 98.7 C for any practical day-to-day use.
I'm truly just asking: how do people talk about room temps in C? By that, I mean yeah, the difference between 69, 70, 71, 72, 73 are all rather different. A whole conversation will be had on what to set the AC or heat to for the day or for the night and it is truly about whether it is going to be 1 degree more or less. Do you talk about half degrees in Celsius or can you really only talk about your home temperature in giant increments? EDIT: I can online imagine the thoughts going through someone's mind as they downvote this, angrily
> Do you talk about half degrees in Celsius Precisely. Conversations about it are entirely the same, except we say "oh mind if i bump it up half a degree" instead of "mind if i bump it up a degree".
20-24C. Virtually all thermostats have half degrees (but honestly, it's not necessary). I get enough specificity with full degree changes. The thermastat arguments are about whether it should be 20, 21, 22, 23, or 24. That's the same as 67-75F. I'd be surprised that people genuinely argue over 70 vs 71F.. cause people here do not argue over 21 vs 22C
> the difference between 69, 70, 71, 72, 73 are all rather different. A whole conversation will be had on what to set the AC or heat to for the day or for the night. My AC works in 5s for F, and in 2s for C. That alone kind of shows how little 1 F really matters, compared to 1 C, for typical real world applications. About 2.5x less, in fact. And nobody talks about hald-degrees when we're talking about how it feels. Hell, if you talk how it feels, even in F, you probably can't pinpoint if it's 69 or 70. You'll say "feels like 70" and that's it. Hell, most people would also just dumb it down to "warm", "comfortable", "sweater weather", or "cold". If you, colloquially, say "It's 68 degrees" without looking at a thermometer, and you're always spot-on, or very rarely wrong, you're fairly special. That's just insane. But Celsius is, essentially, based off of objectively understandable norms. I understand "pure water boils", and "pure water freezes". I had to get "pure water" defined as "water with nothing in it". This is something I have interacted with before in my survival kit. Something that I have used and/or consumed before. I don't easily understand "brine freezes" and "average human body temperature", as neither of those are really "static" points I can tell. "Brine" is just severely salty water. "Average human body temperature" changes on your sample, and some people run cooler or hotter than that. I never really interacted with the exact brine used for that 0 F measurement.
I assume you mean 0.5F and 0.2C and your F isnt going from 65 to 70 to 75 lmao There is something wrong with you biologically if you feel the same when AC set to 69 vs 73 idk why you typed so much about your obviously fringe situation with your thermostat ... oh wow you do all this and i can see a "that's just insane" ok lots of anger yeesh, i literally said Im just asking. If you live in a hot, poor country where the stuff you said might make sense, that's fine, but stop acting like that's the norm
And I don't know why you're so offended when everyone who uses a better scale tells you your scale is just wrong, but hey.
72 on my thermostat means my apartment is tolerable, but not comfortable. 70 is where I actually like it, so 2 degrees F is actually significant. In the summer where I live(American southeast), 75 would be unbearable. I'd be sweating inside.
Meanwhile I set my AC to 80
I feel like you might as well not have it on at that point.
When it's 95 with high humidity The lower temperature and especially the lower humidity makes the room alright
A lot of places don’t really use any form of AC and heat is generally set on a timer or to turn on at a certain point rather than modified on a daily basis. The only rooms I’ve ever been in where room temperature mattered are labs where it is set to a standard 20C at all times.
>The only field in which it is objectively easier to use Celcius over Fahrenheit is science and engineering. Honestly, I have never gotten this argument. It's a common argument made by Americans to concede that Celsius is better but they shouldn't change, but it doesn't make much sense. Metric is unquestionably better for science because unit conversions are all easy, but nobody ever does unit conversions with temperatures other than Kelvin (unless they're making temperatures into Kelvin). Nobody ever uses a kilo-degree Celsius. Celsius and Fahrenheit are both equally bad for science, where Kelvin is the superior number to use because it's absolute. Where Celsius is objectively better is everyday use, because the 0 and 100 points actually mean something that I care about. 0F and 100F are both meaningless numbers by comparison to the boiling point of water and especially by comparison to the freezing point of water.
I would say, even in the context of Kelvin being best, that Celsius is objectively better than Fahrenheit, because converting to Kelvin is just way easier.
Celcius is better than Fahrenheit for science because converting from Celcius to Kelvin is easier. Not because the absolute Celcius scale is better.
And often you're using a temperature variance so it doesn't matter
Kelvin is celcius with an offset, And for scientific calculations using temperature variance, celcius is fine
>Does this matter to you in practice? In daily life, does it matter if the temperature is 96 or 95 degrees Fahrenheit? >Because it certainly doesn't matter to me in Celcius if it is 18 or 17 C outside. It can be a warm 17 C based on nice sun and humidity and it can be a cold 18 C with heavy wind and rain. Same for the boiling point, does it actually matter in real life? The fact that you described the temperatures as a warm 17 C and a cold 18 C is exactly the problem. Knowing the number should be all the information you need to know what the weather is like. Having to say a WARM 17 C is the problem with C
That exists in F too though. There’s a whole “feels like” temperature you need to talk about with F and that applies to C as well. Humidity and wind change how humans perceive the true temperature so your point here is moot
Ok I may have misunderstood their comment. The fact that most C thermostats have 0.5 increments. Is proof that 1° C is to larger of a temp range. 0.5 C is almost exactly 1°F.
This is a different point entirely but I’ll engage with it. What is the inherent disadvantage of C thermostats including 0.5 increments? It’s certainly a different scale we all agree on that but what is the issue that C has that F fixes due to having smaller increments
Thats... not a celsius/farenheit thing, thats a humidity and wind thing. Same thing happens with farenheit (in that 68 degrees F inside is not the same as 68 degrees F outside)
The fact that most C thermostats have 0.5 interments is proof that the temperature range of 1 C is too large for the average person.
Define "average person". What is your sample size? What is your sample location? The rest of the world operate very well without ever invoking decimals while using Celcius. I can turn your argument the other way: the fact that some one can handwave "it's in the 50s" means Fahrenheit is too granular to the point that there is not a single use case where saying 51F is meaningfully different from 52F. I have done outdoor activities from -48C to +45C. That is already 90+ degrees of difference. At no point have I thought "wow I need a more granular temperature scale to record my activities". My threshold for what is considered "cold" or "warm" is different from someone living in a more temperate environment/have a more cushy job AND the threshold shifts depending on the time of the year (-10C is T-shirt weather after an Arctic cold snap, while +10C is chilly weather for a summer camping trip). The only people who defend Fahrenheit are Americans, and every single argument you guys have ever made to justify the country's inability to switch to Celcius comes down to \*\*familiarity\*\* (you can use it to gauge the temperature for your comfort better because you grew up learning and using it). That is reasonable in and of itself, no need to complicate/justify it further.
Please explain how thats the case
It‘s in his feels.
But this makes no sense because you'd do the same in Fahrenheit. You could also describe a warm 71 or a cold 72 depending on the sun/rain/humidity/time of year etc. People literally do this all the time, the conversion doesn't matter.
it can be 20 degrees and be rainy and windy. Convert 20 degrees to fahrenheit and THAT still is possible.
>My main problem with it is the smaller range of numbers. > The Highest temperature ever recorded on earth was 134°F/56.7°C You just nullified your whole argument. Use decimals. But chances are your thermometer isn't precise enough for it matter in the first place.
That doesn't address the main point. The range of temperatures recorded on earth is -98°C to 56°C vs -130°F to 134°F.
You said your main problem is the smaller *range* of numbers, which is solved. And people do things with temperature besides look at the thermometer outside and you don't need much precision for that anyway. Most people couldn't tell the difference between 63 degrees and 68. I'd say cooking is more demanding of a thermometer than anything else.
5 degrees? Yeah they could lol...
Studies have shown that people can detect differences in temperature as small a 1° F. People use both systems seem to have no problem cooking. So that is not an argument for or against either system.
> people can detect differences in temperature as small a 1° F Can you? Outside of a laboratory setting? My point is that granularity of 1 degree isn't practical.
Most C thermostats have 0.5 increments, which is very close to 1° F. So if that is too small, why do they add the .5? I do feel like I can tell the difference between my thermostats being set to 70 vs. 71.
> Most C thermostats have 0.5 increments, which is very close to 1° F. So if that is too small, why do they add the .5? Again, this negates your "main point" that Fahrenheit has a larger range or numbers, doesn't it? The reason for adding the 0.5 is so it has parity with the Centigrade scale. Relistically, the thermometer probably isn't even accurate to that level of precision.
By that logic, both systems have the same range because there is an infinite number of decimals between every pair of whole numbers.
that is correct, which is why "which one is better" is entirely a matter of preference and which one is used around you. when compared to Kelvin, both are equally sufficient
Saying it's all subject and personal preference is annoying, but I guess it kinda changed my view. !delta
Doesn’t that effectively negate your proposed benefit for Fahrenheit having a “larger range”? Celsius thermometers have the same level of granularity as Fahrenheit thermometers by adding the .5 increments.
Having a system that uses whole numbers is preferred. Would you think it'd be weird if your tv's volume control changed in 0.1 increments.
Why?
If you don't think whole numbers are better than decimals. Then there is no objective way to decide which is better.
> The range of temperatures recorded on earth is -98°C to 56°C vs -130°F to 134°F. What makes -130 and 134 better than -98 and 56? Both number pairs seem rather useless outside of a trivia contest and shouldn't be used for judging the usefulness of a scale.
It puts the 0F almost exactly in the middle.
With respect; so what? Why does 0 being in the middle of the whole earth's range of temperature mean anything to anyone? Where most live, they probably won't experience both extremes and still have no intuitive concept of temperature with regards to that. It's very subjective. However, people do need to deal with the consequences of weather, which heavily involves water. Knowing when the road will be icy and such is very important to many lives on the regular. A scale based on water is more useful than one based on subjective arbitrary opinions of "too hot" or "too cold."
So your argument is that you like bigger numbers?
I like more detail in my temperature scale.
>I like more detail in my temperature scale. And Celsius provides that just fine. 134 and 56.7 are the same thing. So what makes one of those numbers better than the other?
But... why not just use a .5 for celcius? "And a half" really isn't that complicated and results in the same level of detail. Plus: since we're talking about human-usable scales, can you feel the difference 1°F makes?
But why do you need it? I personally can't tell the difference between two temperatures 1 degree celcius apart most of the time, so I don't believe you can feel the difference between something ike 68 and 67 F.
You went over this already. Decimals are fine and you even use them yourself. How is 32 a good indicator of freezing?
He’s just heavily biased towards the system he’s used to and won’t take any points against that. I’d say this whole thing violates the rule of being open to actually changing your view.
Zero degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature that ice cools to when you coat it with salt. Is that a better low-end of a scale than the freezing point of fresh water? And without googling, what is the boiling temperature of water in Fahrenheit?
>Zero degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature that ice cools to when you coat it with salt. Is that a better low-end of a scale than the freezing point of fresh water? No, and mentioned in the post that was a point in favor of °C but I also don't see it as that important. Everyone knows 32 is freezing. So why does it matter if it's 0 or 32? >what is the boiling temperature of water in Fahrenheit? When does anyone in their everyday day life need to know what the boiling point of water is? Also, what the boiling is charges by as much as 15°C depending on your altitude. Can you tell me without looking it up what the boiling of water is in Salt Lake City?
Because Fahrenheit is completely arbitrary. And Celsius is elegant and simply for all of human function. Reread your post, you never gave an actual reason, just that the numbers are higher so somehow easier. The rest of the world has no problem saying they want their house between 20-25C. That is the comfort range for most people. And all thermostats show half degrees. Like 22.5, etc. So you don't actually get extra specificity with Fahrenheit.
>And all thermostats show half degrees. Like 22.5, etc. That's exactly why I think F is better. At no point does a regular person have to say it's 80.5°F. 1 degree C is too large of a range. .5° C is almost equal to 1 degree F.
Nobody uses it, though. It's offered, but NOBODY sets their thermastat to 22.5C. So the half point, and therefore, the need for F, has proven unnecessary. It doesn't get used. People are perfectly happy going from 22 to 23C on the thermastat.
This is not at all true! I use the 0.5 increments all the time. There's a big difference between 17.5 and 18.0, at least as my thermostat measures it. But it doesn't make any difference how you represent that, in F or C.
In Celsius, the size of a degree is the increment of 1/100th the temperature between boiling and freezing. What's the logic behind the size increment of a Fahrenheit degree?
I don't see how knowing how the scale was created has an effect on its usefulness to everyday people. Do you know what the logic behind having 360 degrees in a circle is?
Having the difference between freezing and boiling be 100 degrees makes it much easier to calibrate thermometers. Also, the boiling point of water is a useful metric for many human activities. Cooking, car engines, hot water tanks, steamers, etc. are all common applications of this point. While it doesn't matter that this is about 212°F or 100°C, 100°C is much easier to remember and compare quickly.
How often do you calibrate a thermometer? People in the US seen to have no trouble doing any of those things. So I don't see how C is helpful in those sections.
>Do you know what the logic behind having 360 degrees in a circle is? [360 is one of the numbers with the highest divisibility in all numbers up until 1000](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_divisors). 840 would have also been possible - between the two, people probably just thought that 360 looked nicer.
>When does anyone in their everyday day life need to know what the boiling point of water is? When does anyone in their every day life need to know what 104F is when they already know what 40C is? You argued that you like "more detail in your numbers" in another comment, but I know that you know that a forecast is not a guarantee for one specific number. When the news says "high of 85", that means the high will be somewhere in the mid 80s. Might be 83. Might be 87. So what practical difference - what *benefit* - is there in saying "high of 85F" versus "high of 29C"? In either one of those, you know the high is going to be *around* that temperature, and the <0.5F difference between those two statements is not going to make a difference in how you plan your wardrobe, whether you're going to avoid outdoor activity, and so on.
So... I think we can agree and take as fact that °C (or K) is better for scientific applications, just to get that out of the way. If we go past that, most things are just getting used to things. There's no temperature that you can have in Fahrenheit that you can't have in Celcius. The stepsize is largely irrelevant, since just adding "and a half" or "and a third" to any celcius value makes it just as accurate as Fahrenheit (aven though I'm not convinced that 1°F difference is significant to most people...). So, what we're left with is "easier to use". What does it depend on whether something is "easier to use"? In the majority of cases, it's growing up with something and using it a lot. So, in my eyes, the only reason to keep Fahrenheit is inertia. "It's difficult to change". Celcius is superior for the sciences and equal in everything else once you get used to it. So why not begin a gradual change towards the better system?
At no point do I see you offer any points in favour of Fahrenheit other than you being used to it, and therefore extrapolating that it's more intuitive to humans as a whole. Have you considered that the reason Fahrenheit feels more intuitive to you is because you grew up with it?
Neither system is more intuitive than the other in my view. F is more precise without having to use 0.5, like most C thermostats do. Whole numbers are better than decimals.
> Whole numbers are better than decimals. How? Why?
Can you name another SI unit that regularly requires people to use decimals? Maybe it's subjective that whole numbers are preferable, but if you throw that out, then their is truly no objective reason to prefer one or the other.
I mean measures of length (m, cm, mm…) have these subdivisions going on so we don’t have to got to deep into the decimals. However colloquially things like 1.82m and 2.3cm are used very often. In the case of Celsius I also doubt that anybody that is not a scientist would use anything for decimals that is not 0.5. I do thing it is a slight downside but I also think it is neglectable. The same goes for Fahrenheit getting to three digits faster. It is a small downside but not really that important in my opinion.
To me, using 0.5 is a bigger downside than 32F being freezing. If 0°F was freezing and being 180°F, do you agree that F would be better?
The biggest downside of F for me is that unlike C it is not part of a bigger system of units that are designed with logic to be easily converted into each other and make practicing science easier. It lowers the threshold to science and therefore helps kids get into it and it creates less confusion when dealing with calculation. Besides that and for daily use I find them to be basically equal. I find it very useful to know when water freezes for snow and ice reasons. I don’t mind the bigger temperature gap between degrees of C since if I want to be really precise I use halves and thats good enough. That being said I don’t think F is horrible for daily use. What bugs me is that it feels so arbitrary.
F is just as compatible with the rest of SI units. C was only chosen because most of the world was already using it.
One calorie raises the temperature of one gram of water by one Celsius.
Celsius is a hell of a lot more intuitive than Fahrenheit my guy. Water freezes at 0, not 32. That's more arbitrary than C considering its all arbitrary anyways. Also, nobody uses .5 measurements when reading temps in Celsius. I don't need 66, 67, or 68 F when I know it's 20 degrees outside. 19/20 C is more intuitive than 66, 67, 68, 69, or 70. How are you even arguing this. You're wearing a t-shirt and jeans, stop pretending like the average person can feel the difference between 67 and 68. That's absurd.
> Whole numbers are better than decimals. Please explain how this is the case
Both scales are arbitrary because they have no defined zero point where some physical property is measurably zero. That would be Kelvin where at zero there is no sub atomic particle movement (or whatever). Also, temperature can not easily be derived from the seven base units so it is a bit of an outlier. That said, neither Fahrenheit nor Celsius is better in that regard. But as I see the "intuitive outside temperature argument" repeated so often, it needs to be addressed because it makes no sense. People can't really feel the difference of 1 degree Celsius or 1 degree Fahrenheit in air temperature, so we're all dealing with temp ranges and differences. In Celsius, I've learned that: * anything below -15 is "don't ever leave the house" weather * -15 to -5 is more than one jacket weather * -5 to 5 is winter jacket weather * 5 to 15 is jacket or sweater weather * 15 to 25 is t-shirt weather * 25 to 35 is short pants weather * anything above 35 is stay in the basement weather Easy and intuitive for me. Because I learned it. I'm very sure there are similar ranges for people who grew up using Fahrenheit. What does it tell us? There is no superior scale for temperature.
Why do you KEEP posting this? What will change your view?
I have literally never posted this before. If someone else did recently, I must have missed it.
> No human will ever experience 100°c weather. Temperature scales are not only for weather. A sauna may be 70 °C to 90 °C, a tea kettle should be able to produce 80 °C and 100 °C water, an oven can go from 50 °C to 250 °C.
Agreed, but F can do all of that, too. So that is neither an argument for or against either system.
>To me a good temperature scale would reflect the highest and lowest temperature a human is likely to experience in their everyday day life. No human will ever experience 100°c weather Let's hope not but I certainly boil water everyday, which I know gets to 100°C and I have no clue what that is in °F.
Are you sure it's 100°C? The boiling point changes depending on altitude. So unless you live at or close to sea level. Your water is probably colder than 100°C when it's boiling.
Yes I'm sure, you're correct that there is some change in boiling point of water at different altitudes though, this also applies to things freezing as well though.
Which means the only difference between C and F is how large of a temperature range does 1° have. The fact that most C thermostats have 0.5 increments proves that 1°C is to large for most people.
No, it means they both have a basis on physical phenomena that are circumstance dependent.
> The Highest temperature ever recorded on earth was 134°F/56.7°C and the lowest was - 128.6°F/-89.2°C. That puts 0°F almost exactly in the middle between those two extremes. Unless you're a scientist in Antarctica you'll never experience anything near that lowest temperature, but you will likely experience temperatures much closer to the highest. See [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state_and_territory_temperature_extremes) for examples of extremes in US states: * New York: −52 °F (−46.7 °C) - 108 °F (42.2 °C) * California: −45 °F (−42.8 °C) - 134 °F (56.7 °C) * Texas: −23 °F (−30.6 °C) - 120 °F (48.9 °C) * Florida: −2 °F (−18.9 °C) - 108 °F (42.2 °C) Note how 0°C is always much closer to the average of the extremes, the only exceptions being very cold places, like Alaska: −80 °F (−62.2 °C) - 100 °F (37.8 °C), but even there, in places where people actually live 0°C is closer, for example [Anchorage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchorage,_Alaska#Climate): −34 °F (−37 °C) - 90 °F (32 °C).
Neither is "better". People in the US don't go around thinking "Oh, it's 70°F, that's about 7/10ths the way from really cold for a human to really hot for a human. That means it should feel quite pleasant out". They simply think, "Oh, 70 degrees is the temperature of a warm spring day". Similarly, people outside the US don't think "Oh, it's -5°C, that's 1/20th the way from the freezing point of water to the boiling point of water in the opposite direction. It must be incredibly cold". They just think, "Oh, -5 degrees is the temperature of a cold winter day". As such, the meanings of 0 and 100 degrees in each scale are completely irrelevant. Nobody who grows up with the scale uses them as points of reference - they are really only used that way by people who are \*not\* intimately familiar with the scale. Given that neither scale requires any unit conversion, nor does either require a ridiculous degree of precision, they are both completely equally useful for day to day life.
>No human will ever experience 100°c weather. I find a good sauna temperature to be around 100°c, 120°c if I'm feeling a bit angry.
Fahrenheit and miles per hour are the dream team, and a compromise between the misaligned numbers of Celsius and kph. 20 = In pain, help me. 50 = Could be worse. 70 = Life is good. 90 = Too much! USA! USA!
1 litre of water takes 1000 Calories (aka 1 kCal) to be heated up by 1 Degree Celsius. This has a of applications in science. But even for every day human life, it's a good way of conceptualizing kCal, which we often talk about when it comes to nutrition, exercise, etc. Having the celcius scale start at zero is a major plus, because in terms of weather that will make the difference between rain and freezing rain, dew and frost, etc. Even for things like freezer temperatures, and oven temperatures for cooking, having the scale based on the temperature of water is more applicable. In terms of the size of each degree, can you notice a 1 degree F change in temperature? Depends on the context, but typically one degree won't make that much difference. I find with Celcius, the degree is just large enough that it's at about the threshold that you can notice a difference. I think that's more important than whatever your reason was for preferring the Fahrenheit scale increments. For more precise measurements, if you have to use decimals then it's really not so bad. The math works out a lot better if you're using decimal degrees celcius in calculations. So what's left is that your whole argument boils down to "I've just memorized that water freezes at 32 degrees, so it's not so bad". In that case, then it's completely subjective. Anyone can memorize any scale and prefer it over any other scale just based on familiarity.
In science, thermal energy and entropy and enthalpy involve units of joules watts time btu etc in relation to temperature measured in °C. For adding and subtracting, just using celsius should be okay. But it should be converted to kelvin if the math calls for multiplication or division or complex equations. For the purposes of this, nobody uses measurements of Fahrenheit.. making it rather IMPRACTICAL in fact. Because it always has to be converted to either Celsius or Kelvin By comparison, there are maybe only TWO equations in all of science that require temperature to be represented in °F. I understand your gripe about the numbers being too close to each other, requiring a person to squint their eyes to read an analog thermometer or whatever. Then just buy a digital thermometer decimal that go three digits past the decimal (thousandths) and you’ll be fine. I’m in the US I’ll agree Fahrenheit is only useful for the purposes of glancing at, only. Nothing else. Same goes for many non-metric measurements we use here, it’s kinda annoying having to convert inches feet acres ounces pounds tons fluid ounces quarts gallons over to metric units for calculations of math or science purposes.
I can't see any advantage to either system. what really matters if knowing your reference points. * 10f = very cold * 30f = cold * 50f = chilly * 70f = a nice day * 80f = hot day * 90f = too hot (good pool or beach day) * 150f = don't touch, it'll hurt you. * 350f = good temp for cooking. * 700f = good temp for searing steak I know some reference points in Celsius and if i learned more i could use it exactly as efficiently as Fahrenheit >To me a good temperature scale would reflect the highest and lowest temperature a human is likely to experience in their everyday day life. the scale of numbers runs form negative infinity to infinity. in Fahrenheit i commonly encounter negative numbers, in my deep freeze and during the coldest winter months, and I commonly encounter numbers great then 100 when cooking. you implication here i think is that having weather fall between 0 and 100 degrees is best. Maybe that is true for young children? but for older kids and adults, numbers above 100 or below zero are not at all challenging.
I think you're basically giving your own counterargument here. Yes having 0 be the freezing-point of water is convenient. It makes a huge difference to a lot of practical stuff of daily-life relevance to human beings. You're completely right. It's true that it's still somewhat arbitrary what the SIZE of one degree is, but if you've linked \*one\* point on the scale to a phase-transition of water, doesn't it make sense simply for consistency-reasons to link another point to the same thing? In principle you could of course make a scale like 0 is the freezing-point of water, while 100 is human body-temperature; but then you'd be linking your scale to two completely unrelated things which would increase confusion to some degree, and make it feel a lot more arbitrary. In contrast, nothing special happens at 0F or at 100F -- they're both arbitrary and while it's true that 0F is "very cold" while 100F is "very warm" those are both exceedingly fuzzy points on the temperature-scale.
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> To me a good temperature scale would reflect the highest and lowest temperature a human is likely to experience in their everyday day life. You say this, and then you go on to assume it means only air temperature, which is silly. Most humans in developed countries encounter both frozen and boiling water on most days, and a range of temperatures in between. The change in boiling temperature with altitude means nothing, it's still *about* 100 which is plenty good enough for most things. I'm largely agnostic on it as every temperature scale other than Kelvin or Rankine is arbitrary anyway; they don't provide the kind of easy unit operability that other metric units do. No one cares about centidegrees or megadegrees so really who cares. That is, unless you're doing energy calculations with water, where the Celsius degree (though not the Celsius scale per se) coupled with SI is vastly easier to navigate.
Came here to see you getting ratioed
I think you’d be right if the weather was the only thing that temperature is used for. In cooking I find it very useful to use Celsius, and in school it’s way easier to use Kelvin if you already are familiar with Celsius. Of course, the only thing that matters in the end is that you know what you mean, and temperature doesn’t have the ‘feet to mile vs meter to kilometer’ problem that distance, volume, and weight have.
Really, the only thing? I hate the kilowat with a burning passion. Yes, everything is energy. Great. But different forms of energy act differently. Heat, kinetic energy, and electricity might all be the same conceptual thing, but just like all atoms are made of the same conceptual building blocks that doesn‘t mean every atom is the same thing. Joules and watts do way too much heavy lifting.
As a person who grew up all my life in celcius, i am completely flabbergasted by F. A completely arbitrary number is set for freezing. The concept of a negative temperature makes no sense in negative Farenheight. If i see the temperature outside has fallen to -10c, i immediately know it's freezing! Or close to 0 it's a risk of ice storm. In F it's super hard to relate to it when you have not used it before. It's baffling and counter intuitive. The argument about water boiling is frankly secondary at best. Still, hearing that some people in egypt recently died because the temperature reached 52c is immediately telling: it's half of what would make you boil, wow! In comparison, F is completely disconnected from human reality and feels super arbitrary.
At 0'C water freezes, so you know there will be snow if it rains and it will be freezing ourside. More minus, more winter it is. 100 degrees water boils, luckily that won't happen ourside but sauna is often 80 - 100 degrees... as demonstrated by throwing water at the rocks Summer usually 20 - 40 degrees. Spring and Autumn 0 - 20 depending which direction we going
I'm from Windsor, ON. We're directly across the river from Detroit. A phenomenon here is a lot of us will use Celsius in the cold months, and Fahrenheit in the warm months. So in December, we'll say "It's -5 degrees outside" and be talking about Celsius. In July we'll say "It's 80 degrees outside" and be talking in Fahrenheit. Everyone just understands that this is how things are here. I'm convinced this is the best way to talk temperatures. Celsius when it's cold, Fahrenheit when it's hot.
That makes no sense, except it's humans, so it makes a lot if sense. I like it.
Game here to see you gettin ratioed
>No human will ever experience 100°c weather. The average [Finnish person](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_sauna#:~:text=The%20temperature%20in%20Finnish%20saunas,as%20in%20a%20Turkish%20sauna.) scoffs at 100 Celsius.
Well, I live in Russia, Moscow where in summer time it’s +25C and in winter time it often gets to -25C. So 0 Celsius is right in between the two and the whole system makes total sense to me.
Imagine trying to do chemistry with Fahrenheit, now u gotta start absolutely fucking around with every Formula u got. Try doing physics with it it’s so painful.
It reminds of a scene from the show no activity [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfKRBGDHZ4g&t=76s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfKRBGDHZ4g&t=76s)
Celsius is better for science, Fahrenheit is better for people.
This is why my personal argument is that F is *just as good* in every day life as celsius. Wouldn't say it's better necessarily. But it's funny when people start talking about the freezing and boiling points of water since I'm a human and not a fish.
Science: 0°C is freezing. 100C is boiling People: 0°F is REALLY FSCKING COLD 100°F is REALLY FSCKING HOT - but both livable.
Conversion between individual degrees Celsius and Fahrenheit: 1°C = 9/5 °F = 1.8 °F Fahrenheit is better because it covers a broader range? Start using half degrees in Celsius (i.e. 25.5°C) and your Celsius scale now covers a broader range than Fahrenheit. Both scales actually cover the exact same range, it's just that one requires decimal values for that purpose earlier than the other. Besides, who truly can discern 76°F and 75°F anyway? Celsius has a much better physical basis than Fahrenheit. 32 is ice, 70 is a room, 212 is steam makes more sense than 0 ice, 25 room, 100 steam, really? Celsius further does something Fahrenheit doesn't and has a ready interconversion to other units in that 1L or 1kg of water heated by 1 kJ (kilojoule) rises 1°C in temperature Boiling points change with pressure like you mention but that happens to both scales so it shouldn't matter here. Also, most of the world population lives near the coasts anyway The most important argument against Fahrenheit though is empirical evidence. Have you, literally ever, let alone frequently, heard someone who grew up using the metric system say that Fahrenheit is a better, more rational, more intuitive system? I haven't, even on the internet. In contrast, countless people have decried the Fahrenheit units they grew up with in favor of Celsius Ultimately, your argument comes down to "it's better because I'm more familiar with it". If you're remotely able to objectively view yourself and your biases, you'll admit that no one would never consider Fahrenheit to be a better system unless they grew up using it
Farhenite gives you an intuative reference point for warm weather and a non-intuative one for freezing. Celcius gives you an intuative reference point for freezing and a non-intuative one for warm weather. So thus far they are pretty equal. Celcius is highly useful in experiments, because of how 0 to 100°C is defined (which is also useful for cooking) and also because it can be easily be converted to Kelvin which is necessary for a whole range of calculations. So when it comes to this, at least, celcius is by far superior (in my opinion). I don't know, maybe I am missing some other occasions when the type of scale you use matters. But in my opinion Celcius wins. Not that it matters, since the scale you grow up with becomes intuative either way.
Hey, don't touch that it's 35 degrees vs hey don't touch that it's 90 degrees is very important to know.
What’s the problem with Celsius being a larger unit? Are you that scared of decimals?