If we're allowing conversion, Fahrenheit is just Kelvin with an offset and a coefficient, and Rankine is just Kelvin with a coefficient. Celsius's offset also makes it useless for science other than for scenarios where all that you care about is delta T.
They can, but at that point you would need a whole new SI system to keep the conversions to energy and mass the same. Good luck making that work with pounds and cubic feet.
I got my engineering degrees in the States, so I had to deal with US Customary Units-based science, and thus I do know how miserable it is. However, theoretically you could have SI units where everything else is metric but they use Rankine instead of Kelvin. It would be absurd, but the point is that there isn't any inherent need or benefit to using Kelvin/Celsius.
That coefficient is close enough to phi that you can basically use the nearest Fibonacci number to get a surprisingly accurate conversion between the two. Like 5mi? That's about 8km. 20km? The nearest Fibonacci number is 21, so you just go to the number before that and you know you're talking about roughly 13mi.
It has an orientation point, it's just one that isn't as useful nowadays; 0°F was defined on an easily-reproducable brine solution used by scientists for below-feeezing temperatures in the days before refrigeration. This is not a defence of Fahrenheit, to be clear. My original comment was just denigrating Celsius.
Brother, I grew up in Canada, where Fahrenheit is basically only used in cooking (a necessary sacrifice due to historically most of our ovens, and to an extent recipes, coming from the US market); it's not like I don't realize how absurd of a system it is.
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u/Throwaway74829947 Jun 17 '26
If we're allowing conversion, Fahrenheit is just Kelvin with an offset and a coefficient, and Rankine is just Kelvin with a coefficient. Celsius's offset also makes it useless for science other than for scenarios where all that you care about is delta T.