The book Inventing Temperature by Hasok Chang is a wonderful account of how hard it has been to grapple with temperature scientifically. My favorite anecdote i

The book Inventing Temperature by Hasok Chang is a wonderful account of how hard it has been to grapple with temperature scientifically. My favorite anecdote is the scientist who carried arround and shook a bottle for two weeks to distill the water for experiments in finding when water boiled. When the water exploded after heating he found that not only did he not know when water boiled, but now he wasn't even sure what boiling was.