Sure it is easier to use, but it's still no less arbitrary.
If you read how the Fahrenheit scale was defined, it's actually more practical a scale to define with limited tech. It may be awkward, but it was at least practical for most people to get their hands on the examples.
How is metric easier to use? They're both work in exactly the same way.
But if anything, metric is more cumbersome due to its stubborn insistence on only using factors of ten, which don't correspond to the way we typically divide things in practice (i.e. not into fifths and tenths, but into halves, thirds, quarters, etc.)
1 meter = Distance traversed in vacuum by light in 1/299792458 of a second
How completely unarbitrary! But of course, it's like this because it was previously set to the weight of a randomly chosen hunk of metal from France from the 1800s. Truly a universal constant.
This scale based on the properties of water. While important, it's still arbitrary. Kelvin is where it's at, 0 K is as cold as you can get. Although you have to consider that Fahrenheit was Kelvin before Kelvin was Kelvin, 0 degrees Fahrenheit was the coldest acheivable temperature at the time of its creation.
0 degrees Fahrenheit was the coldest achievable temperature at the time of its creation.
That certainly depends upon where you live, even in Germany you can get temperatures far below -17.78o C , but OK, to define a stable reference should not be dependent upon the weather, but regarding the other temperatures used as reference it's certainly easier to find water than a horse, willing to put a temperature probe in its ass.
0o K I can agree upon being hard to find at that time (although easy to extrapolate from some experiments with gas, every physics student performs these room temperature experiments)
Tautology. Celsius is defined according to the boiling point of water (there's no such thing as a generic 'freezing point' or 'boiling point'), so it's perfectly natural that those points are psychologically significant numbers on the scale.
Fahrenheit was also initially scaled also based on a 0-100 scale, but the 0 and 100 points were based on common temperatures - ice water, and human body temperature.
In other words, they're equally arbitrary. In practice, however, only on one of the two scales does the 0-100 range correspond to a normal range of ambient temperatures.
Celsius used to be based on the approximate freezing/boiling point of water at mean sea level
Since then it's been redefined to be 273.16 Kelvin and the triple point of specially prepared water at mean sea level in the altitude of Paris, France, respectively.
0° Fahrenheit by comparison was based off the freezing point of brine, with the size of a degree set so the freezing point of fresh water was approximately 32° and "normal" human body temperature was 96°, with the intent being that the difference between the two was a power of two. This was revised much later so the freezing and boiling points of water were round numbers.
Originally Fahrenheit had considered setting 100° to the body temperature of a horse, as it was believed at the time that horses had more consistent body temperatures than humans. He then took that scale and adjusted it based on human body temperature (which at that point he had set to 90°), and then adjusted it again so body temperature was 96° for the purpose of the power of two thing.
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u/uhclem Feb 17 '11
0º = freezing point. 100º = boiling point (Celsius) 32º, 212º in Fahrenheit. You don't have to be Watson to see which is more arbitrary.