Actually, I'm not so sure. If you used inverse temperature (i.e. "coldness") and scaled it properly, it wouldn't actually be all that different, in practice, fr

Actually, I'm not so sure. If you used inverse temperature (i.e. "coldness") and scaled it properly, it wouldn't actually be all that different, in practice, from a positive temperature scale. Here is a plot of Temperature vs. Coldness from 0-100 C, scaled such that water freezes at 100 coldness units and boils at 0 coldness units[1]: https://i.imgur.com/fluOSY2.png https://i.imgur.com/fluOSY2.png It traces out a pretty gentle curve, which seems like it's not appreciably less linear than our ability to perceive differences in temperatures (from eyeballing this: https://biology.stackexchange.com/a/28522 https://biology.stackexchange.com/a/28522), so probably for day-to-day use inverse temperature would be a perfectly acceptable substitute. Of course, this is just to say that if we were starting de novo today in determining how to discuss temperature, coldness could be a reasonable choice. I don't think it actually offers substantial advantages over the current system and it would likely be very costly to switch everyone over just for the sake of making it a bit easier to think about why temperature has an absolute zero. [1] Python source code: https://bpaste.net/show/76bf4f7c36cb https://bpaste.net/show/76bf4f7c36cb