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Why? The slope of the Fahrenheit scale is different to the Celsius and Kelvin scales, but the slope of the latter two does match.
by perching_aix 1y ago
Why? The slope of the Fahrenheit scale is different to the Celsius and Kelvin scales, but the slope of the latter two does match.
- meindnoch 1y agoOk. Then please explain what % does the temperature rise when going from 0 Celsius to 5 Celsius!
- stephencanon 1y agoOr -1 to 1 Celsius, for that matter.
- chihuahua 1y agoObviously it's -200%, which means that going from -1C to 1C is a drastic decrease in warmness!
- azernik 1y agoThe slope of the Fahrenheit scale matches that of the Rankine scale. I would still say that the in the Rankine scale percentage increases make sense, and Fahrenheit changes to not. The thing that matters isn't the slope, but the zero point; "X% farther from absolute zero" is a useful measurement, "X% farther from an arbitrary zero point" is not. Especially when negative or zero temperatures are involved.
- lolinder 1y agoThe slope of the scales has no bearing on whether percentages are meaningful here. The problem with both systems when it comes to percentages is that neither system has 0 set to a natural 0. This leads to an entirely arbitrary point on the scale where decreases in the unit will approach a 100% difference and then suddenly start decreasing again. If anything Fahrenheit should be less insane because at least the artificial 0 is likely to stay much further away in the data they're quantifying so the percentages stay reasonable.
- perching_aix 1y agoAh right, okay, that makes sense.
- detourdog 1y agoEarly measurements were done by individuals and they were idiosyncratic to the process of discovery/calibration. Kelvin is refined measurements used to relate to a wider scale of temperatures. Celsius is a metric human scale subset of Kelvin.