this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
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After joking about this at work, I landed on the most cursed scale I could think of... pT = log10 FPW.
Pros: no bottom to scale, increasing negative values asymptotically approach absolute zero. Water freezes at zero.
1 pT is almost exactly the melting point of iridium. Lightning bolts are around 2 pT. Boiling points of neon and helium are in the neighborhood of -1 and -2.
At least that follows some mathematical logic. Mohs scale of hardness is pretty close to pT scale in that sense, but there’s no mathematics or logic involved. It’s just a list of standard materials that define specific points on the scale. When you compare the results with a more logical scale, it looks neatly non-linar at first glance, but the closer you look, the less sense it makes. It’s just a list of exceptions to whatever rule you may have had in mind.
Doesn’t mean it’s a useless scale. You can totally use it for qualitative assessment of hardness, but steer clear of it when numbers and decimals actually matter.