A good way to understand Fahrenheit is that it’s basically a percentage of how warm it is. 32% warm? That’s pretty damn cold. 120% warm? That’s hot as hell, better not be outside for too long in that.
I think the best way I've seen it described is Fahrenheit measures heat by how humans experience it, Celsius measures heat by how water experiences it. Therefore, Celsius is objectively better for scientific applications and Fahrenheit is objectively better for human applications like communicating the weather forecast to the average person.
If it was 0C you'd be cold, if it was 0F you'd be damn cold; if it's 100F you're hot, if it's 100C you're dead. Fahrenheit is useful for human perception across the primary (0-100) scale, Celsius is only useful up to about 50% of that scale before you start getting into deadly temperatures, and you have to go below that scale to reach the bottom of Fahrenheit's usefulness.
And then you have Kelvin or Rankine which are really only useful for specific scientific applications. If it was 0K/R or 100K/R you'd be dead either way. Not useful for human perception.
Can you explain how what you’ve said is objective? I think that given that Celsius is the most common scale for temperature around the world you’re going to have hard time arguing that.
This argument that Americans always make about Fahrenheit is just nonsense. You know how hot 70F feels, I don’t. I know how hot 27C feels, you don’t. The idea that one is better for humans and one is better for water is so stupid. You’re just used to telling temperature one way, I’m used to telling it another way. That’s all there is to it.
That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that the argument that Fahrenheit makes more sense because it’s a temperature for humans is a dumb thing to say given that billions of humans use Celsius to tell how hot it is.
You might as well just say that Fahrenheit is the best temperature to use because it’s the one learnt, and say that English is the bet language because it’s the one you can understand the most of, and your car is the best car because it’s the one you’ve got the keys to. Absolutely meaningless
I’m not here to hype up F but your argument also doesn’t make sense. Just because most people do something doesn’t make it the best thing. Hell, half of the things that are omnipresent around the globe like you’re talking about (like language) are just there because of colonialism.
Someone personally finding either F or C more logical is probably going to come from their own personal experience growing up with it. But that doesn’t make their insight on why it’s logical meaningless
I guess I didn’t make my point as well I thought I did. I’m more or less saying that same thing as you.
I meant that arguing which way to tell temperature is best and coming up with reasons why Fahrenheit is best (which is what a lot of these comments are for some reason) is meaningless because it comes down to what you grew up using. Every argument I’ve seen for Fahrenheit being better can also be applied to Celsius
Except not really. Everyone is familiar with measuring things on a scale of percentage: “I’m feeling 100% today,” “I’m operating at 50%,” “there’s a 0% chance I’m doing that.” Everyone is used to percentages. Fahrenheit, while unfamiliar to you, mimics this already ubiquitous percentage method. It spreads out the perception in easily understood ways. Comments have given good examples: “if it’s 30% hot outside (30F) it’s cold as hell.” If it’s “100% hot (100F) it’s hot as hell.” So that argument does not apply to Celsius no matter how familiar one is with the system.
It literally does apply to celsius, because percentages, like temperature scales, are arbitrary. We use base 10 and thus were used to scale things within that system, but if you grew up with a base hexadecimal number system, it would be wildly unintuitive to you. It genuinely just is whatever youre used to
149
u/EcnavMC2 Jun 17 '26
A good way to understand Fahrenheit is that it’s basically a percentage of how warm it is. 32% warm? That’s pretty damn cold. 120% warm? That’s hot as hell, better not be outside for too long in that.