this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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Fahrenheit: how hot humans feel
Celsius: how hot water feels
Kelvin & Rankine: how hot atoms feel
I don’t think how hot humans feel works at all, it’s just arbitrary
Can humans survive 100 degree heat? Yes so it doesn’t represent 100%
150 for 3rd degree burns (almost instant), does Fahrenheit go off base 150? Also no
What about cold? Well -40 requires a lot of layers, so then +40 should be pretty hot for humans right? Nope, because it’s not related to humans at all
100°F was supposed to be average human body temp. Guy who made the scale fucked up his math and we ended up actually at 98.6°F
Nah, that's a myth. It's actually a little more complicated than that, and the actual measurements changed over time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit
"the original paper suggests the lower defining point, 0 °F, was established as the freezing temperature of a solution of brine made from a mixture of water, ice, and ammonium chloride (a salt).[2][3] The other limit established was his best estimate of the average human body temperature, originally set at 90 °F, then 96 °F (about 2.6 °F less than the modern value due to a later redefinition of the scale)."
That's from your link. Seems like the guy you responded to was correct or the wiki isn't.
For people wanting to not Read: freezing and boiling were intended to be 180° apart, or the opposite sides of a circle. So a gauge using his scale would have one degree of temperature equal one degree of rotation.
For set points, he used his best approximation of average human body temperature, and the coldest stable temperature that could easily be replicated, which was a freezing brine solution whose temperature would self stabilize. What he set those set points to was based of the work of an older scale, that he adjusted to get rid of fractions and make more fine tuned.
If farenheit represents how humans feel then 50 is the most comfortable temperature right?
0 should be the most comfortable, with less being cold and more being hot.
This is a great scale. Let's solve all the arguments about temperature and instead just create a "pleasantness scale". Could probably even market this and sell a "personalised pleasantness scale" and you pass it out to your friends when you meet them.
In human terms, only 65 and above is passable.
Neither will kill you (usually) but both suck.
Fahrenheit was originally calculated to be 64 even divisions between water freezing temp and human body temp, then 32 more units below freezing.
Then ambient human body temp was recalculated from 96F to 98.6F.
So it's not exactly arbitrary. It's based on powers of 2, based upon an inaccurate measurement.
I mean, the temperature 0 was assigned because it was the lowest temperature that winter in Fahrenheit's town, and the "powers of two" was only chosen because it was simple to mark degree lines on his instrument. Feels quite arbitrary to me...
And yet, as a person, Fahrenheit seems far more intuitive and Celsius arbitrary.
I have no idea what this means.
Why do these matter? What percentage of humans live where it's regularly -40 degrees? Why does the scale need to be perfect in your opinion? And how is Celsius better?
Humans can survive 100 F so it’s not a scale of 0-100, which you would expect for a system based on humans
The person I responded to said it was based off humans, I was arguing that it wasn’t because no patterns exist in relation to humans
Well the person claimed it’s based on the temperature of water at sea level with 0 being freezing and 100 being boiling. This would be the 0-100% for water
Technically, water can still go higher than 100°C, same as humans can go higher than 100°F. Water turns into steam. If the temperature continues to rise, the steam would theoretically enter a plasma state. Then, you could say the water has "died" as the atoms and molecules lose their electrons.
No one said it's a scale limited from 0 to 100 on the basis of survivability. That's something you just made up on the spot to push some weird narrative.
I again have no idea what you're saying. The patterns of 0 being low and 100 being high isn't a pattern related to humans? That's obviously not true. We use 0 as the bottom and 100 for the top on a lot of other things.
Why are you limiting 0 and 100 as cut offs?
No one said it represents "100%", whatever that is even supposed to mean. 100F is really hot outside. 0 F is really cold. Doesn't have to make 100% sense. Celsius doesn't make perfect sense either. There is no perfect magical scale that works completely.
Fahrenheit only works like that if ur used to extreme cold tempature. Anything under 10c (50f) is cold af to me and 38c (100f) is hot sure but nowhere near as cold as -17c (0f) is
It’s pointing out multiple ways that it doesn’t represent people
"really hot" and "really cold" are supremely useless terms in this context though.
Yeah, this gets repeated (by Americans) every time a discussion about temperature measuring systems comes up, but it is complete nonsense. The vast majority of Earth's population are completely fine with measuring how hot they feel in celsius, it is only people who are unaccustomed to that system who thinks it is somehow unqualified to do that.
American who lives in a country that uses C now.
20=frickin cold 30=swampy ass 40=nope
Not enough degrees of separation
20 isn’t cold at all, it’s perfectly warm.
10 is nippy, but you still warm up quick after a few minutes walking, and get sweaty if you’re working on something.
0 is cold enough for a couple layers. Jumper + jacket so you can take one off if you warm up too much.
-10 doesn’t feel that much different to 0.
-20 is time to put on a thicker coat over the jumper.
I lived for a third of my life in a country that uses Celsius, and the switch to Fahrenheit was not only seamless, it made much more sense to me intuitively. Whereas I was fine using Celsius, I don't really want to go back.
Downvote my experience all you want, bitches
It's not gonna change