In Defense of Fahrenheit

The author argues against Celsius because it &#x27;feels&#x27; wrong? Well, I&#x27;ve grown up with Celsius all my life, and Farenheit just &#x27;feels&#x27; wrong to me.<p>Everything is relative. The author deems 35 deg C as being &quot;grossly hot&quot;, but that is just the average temperature to me where I live. He calls 0 degrees not even cold, but for me, that is almost unbearably cold.<p>Having a datum of 0 for freezing makes sense, especially for professions like flying (I used to be a pilot). Knowing that you are close to a point when water will turn from liquid to solid can be life saving, and I have no problems with using negatives to determine HOW solid.

The argument that 0-100 being an intuitive and useful daily use scale is actually a good one.<p>However, everything else falls flat.<p>Nobody actually uses decimals with celcius, because nobody can tell the difference between 8.2 degrees and 8.7 degrees. It&#x27;s just 8 and 9.<p>Zero being freezing is a critical number to know, because that&#x27;s when you can get black ice (+&#x2F;- wind-chill) and snow.<p>Knowing that 35 is grossly hot is no more difficult than knowing -32 is freezing.<p>Celcius has simple ranges: Below 0: it&#x27;s freezing, bundle up 0-10: it&#x27;s cold outside, wear a jacket 10-20: good for physical activity, sweater and light jacket required 20-30: it&#x27;s comfortable outside 30+: stay in the shade<p>That said, all our appliances (oven, barbecue) use Fahrenheit and I have no idea what temperature to cook at in celcius.

The author lists the importance of a global temperature scale, then shows a map of North America overlaid with some dots.<p>&gt; For many people that&#x27;s Celsius, but for many others it&#x27;s Fahrenheit.<p>That second &#x27;many&#x27; is disingenuous. For about 90% of the planet&#x27;s population it&#x27;s Celsius, and for about 10% it&#x27;s Fahrenheit.<p>Author also has some pretty arbitrary and bewildering requirements, including wanting a scale of 0 to 100, yet also avoiding any 3-digit numbers.<p>Any claims about &#x27;intuition&#x27; are misguided -- Celsius makes more sense because a) most people use it, and b) it maps onto the rest of the SI units.<p>That I happen to feel comfortable at a somewhat arbitrary 21 (c) is not a sufficient or satisfactory reason for other people to let go of deprecated temperature scales.

Celsius is much more useful than stipulated here. For example, it takes 1J (Joule) to heat 1g (which is also 1ml) of pure water 1 degree Celsius.<p>The metric system is all weighted and related from temperature to mass to distance. This is what makes it so useful for Science, and frankly, every day use.

&gt; The truth is, outside of a chemistry lab I don&#x27;t care that much about the freezing and boiling points of water<p>What? Freezing point of water is one of the most important things with temperature outside. Will it snow or rain? Will the lake freeze or melt? Will the road be slippery or not. That is like... the most important thing about temperature and outside.<p>However, I agree that the boiling temperature of water is not much used outside in a daily life.

Or we could just stop this Freedom Units bullshit and be like normal people. It feels wrong is not a reason to keep doing the stupid thing.

There is a desperate attempt by some news papers in the UK to bring back Fahrenheit, The problem being only those over 40 really knows what it means to have a 85f &quot;scorcher&quot;<p>its only being done as a symbol of &quot;freedom&quot; from the EU loving french.

&gt;The truth is, outside of a chemistry lab I don&#x27;t care that much about the freezing and boiling points of water<p>Even in a chemistry lab, Celsius isn&#x27;t that great, it&#x27;s Kelvin that actually has an advantage. And Rankine would be about as good.

Celsius is pretty easy to wrap my head around, even though I think in Fahrenheit. I think my main argument against Fahrenheit is when I&#x27;m cooking and look up food safety information I usually convert to Celsius in my head because I have a pretty intuitive sense of temperatures as a percentage of the boiling point of water but Fahrenheit I really don&#x27;t. I also don&#x27;t imagine anyone using Celsius as their &quot;native language&quot; routinely converts to Fahrenheit in their head just to get a better understanding of what a temperature means.

In practice a difference of 1 degree celsius is slightly noticeable. But given that 1 degree Fahrenheit is only 5&#x2F;9 degree celsius, do you really care if it‘s 74 or 75F outside?

For everyday use the unit does not matter at all. We could drop numbers completely and just say it&#x27;s freezing, cold, chilly, ok, warm and hot and be done with it. For cooking we could just use simmer, boil, stew and bake.<p>But Celsius interacts with other units nicely. So when you actually need some precision, Celsius works nicely. Kelvin is of course the one to choose when talking about scientific matters, but Celsius works well enough for everyday things and when precision is needed.

So why is the metric system based on water, instead of liquid hydrogen? Why not use the most common essential element, instead of some arbitrary compound?<p>Metric seems pretty anthropocentrist to me, since humans are 50-60% water, while the universe is 75% hydrogen.<p>In the Universal Hydrogen Metric system, 0 °H would be -259.2 °C, and 100 °H would be −252.87 °C.

I think there are a lot of similarities between F and C as there are with the use of military time. In the US we use AM&#x2F;PM for civilian use but in England you see them use military time for things like TV show times, and train&#x2F;bus times. It all seems very regimental.

I think a lot of people here are missing the most important point, which is that Fahrenheit roughly maps 0-100 to the most common temperature ranges experienced in daily weather, which is by far the most frequent use of temperature for most people.

Rankine is even better. (like Fahrenheit plus 459.67°)<p>You get the same step size as Fahrenheit, so you can adjust your house temperature without a decimal. (some of us care) It is also good enough for industrial food processing without that decimal, for example in canneries.<p>You get a correct zero. Fahrenheit and Celsius are just wrong. Think about the meaning of something like &quot;twice as hot&quot;, which is a thing people say. With a correct zero, there is no need for negatives unless you are doing quantum physics research. If you aren&#x27;t convinced, imagine we had a weight scale that used 0 for a very small adult and 100 for a very large adult.<p>All the normal temperatures people deal with, including oven temperatures, are exactly 3 digits. The 3-digit numbers 100 to 999 are like Fahrenheit from -359.67° to 539.33°.

I think alternative measurements are cute and I encourage their usage simply because they make epic reddit science guys so irrationally mad.<p>The year is Reiwa 1, it&#x27;s 51° F out, and I weigh 9.92 stone. Deal with it.

LOL. Do people really still use fahrenheit over there?

tldr; Fahrenheit maps the subjective feeling of very cold to very hot to a scale from 0 to 100.<p>Celsius on the other hand gives you additional information about the state of water at this temperature (0C frozen, 100C boiling).<p>The author didnt talk about the correct physical unit, Kelvin, which tells you about the possibitiy of the temperature (no Kelvin values below 0).

Fahrenheit seems to be a good scale for weather. It would be a pretty simple matter to make a human friendly scale based on Celsius - halve the unit. Freezing is zero degrees, and boiling is 200 degrees. I call this unit Celinheit:<p>Here&#x27;s how that looks when compared with Fahrenheit:<p><pre><code> 0F == -35 Ch 10F == -24 Ch 20F == -13 Ch 32F == 0 Ch 40F == 9 Ch 50F == 20 Ch 60F == 32 Ch 70F == 42 Ch 80F == 53 Ch 90F == 64 Ch</code></pre> 100F == 76 Ch 110F == 86 Ch<p>The advantages of this system:<p>* 40-60 would be considered about ideal.<p>* Each 10 degree &quot;band&quot; has a feeling, similar to Fahrenheit.<p>* Converting to metric would be really easy.<p>Disadvantages:<p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;927&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;927&#x2F;</a>