Why fahrenheit and celsius

Kiger Updated: May 17, If you're an American and you've ever had a conversation with someone from another country about the weather, you've probably been a little confused when he or she says that the afternoon temperature is a nice 21 degrees.

To you, that might sound like a chilly winter day, but to them, it's a pleasantly warm springtime temperature. That's because virtually every other country in the rest of the world uses the Celsius temperature scale, part of the metric system, which denotes the temperature at which water freezes as 0 degrees, and the temperature at which it boils as degrees.

But the U. That means that the 21 degrees C temperature that we previously mentioned is the equivalent of a balmy 70 degrees F in the U.

The persistence of Fahrenheit is one of those puzzling American idiosyncrasies, the equivalent of how the U. So why is it that the U. There doesn't seem to be a logical answer, except perhaps inertia. Americans generally loathe the metric system — this poll found that just 21 percent of the public favored converting to metric measures, while 64 percent were opposed.

It might make more sense if Fahrenheit was old-school and Celsius was a modern upstart, sort of the New Coke of temperature. But in reality, they were created only about two decades part. Fahrenheit was created by its namesake, a German scientist named Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, who in the early s was the first to design alcohol and mercury thermometers that were both precise and consistent, so that any two of his instruments would register the same temperature reading in a given place at a given moment.

When Fahrenheit started out, the key thing that he was interested in was coming up with the same temperature reading all the time, not comparing temperatures of different things or different times of day.

But when he presented a paper on his system for measuring temperature to the Royal Society of London in , he apparently realized that he had to come up with a standard temperature scale as well.

He suggested that the range of possible temperatures in the universe far exceeded those proposed by Celsius and Fahrenheit. The concept of an absolute minimum temperature was not new, according to NIST , but Kelvin put an exact number to it: 0 kelvins is equal to Related: What's the coldest place in the universe?

It describes the amount of kinetic energy contained by the particles that constitute a blob of matter, that wiggle and jiggle around at sub-microscopic levels," she said. This is absolute zero, which is the benchmark of the Kelvin scale. Related: Scientists pinpoint a new record for coldest natural temperature in Greenland. Until recently, scientists thought that humans could not recreate this temperature because to become that cold, energy would have to be added to the system to cool it, meaning that the system would be warmer than absolute zero.

But in , German physicists managed to push particles into paradoxical temperatures below absolute zero. To Kelvin's mind, absolute zero was where a temperature scale should begin, but for convenience, he used the markers and intervals of the widely-known Celsius scale as a base for his own.

As such, in the Kelvin scale, water freezes at A single kelvin is referred to as a unit, rather than a degree, and is equal to a single degree on the Celsius scale.

The Kelvin scale is mainly used by scientists. In , the Kelvin was redefined to make it more accurate, according to a paper in the journal Metrologia , and its definition is now tethered to the Boltzmann constant.

This constant links temperature to the kinetic energy inside matter. The new definition, according to the General Conference on Weights and Measures , is: "The kelvin, symbol K, is the SI unit of thermodynamic temperature; its magnitude is set by fixing the numerical value of the Boltzmann constant to be equal to exactly 1. J K-1 [joules per kelvin]. To convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius, subtract 32 and divide that number by 1.

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These changes, all around the same time, prompted the US to consider going metric itself. It made sense to switch over, both because the metric system is more intuitive and because adopting the same system as other countries would make scientific cooperation much easier. Congress passed a law, the Metric Conversion Act, that was theoretically supposed to begin the process of metrication. It set up a Metric Board to supervise the transition.

The law crashed and burned. Because it made metrication voluntary , rather than mandatory, the public had a major say in the matter. And lots of people didn't want to have to learn new systems for temperatures or weights. Organized labor fought it as well, according to Zengerle, so workers wouldn't have to retrain to learn the new measures. President Reagan dismantled the Metric Board in , its work in tatters. Congress's dumb implementation of the law ensured that America would keep measuring temperature in Fahrenheit.

Today, the US is virtually alone in the world in staying off the metric system, joined only by Burma and Liberia Burma announced its intent to metricate in The bizarre measurements commonly used in the US, including Fahrenheit, are bad for its scientific establishment, its kids, and probably its businesses. Susannah Locke lays out the case for Celsius and the rest of the metric system very persuasively, but here's a brief recap.

The simpler metric scales make basic calculations easier and thus less error-prone. American companies incur extra costs by producing two sets of products, one for the US and one for the metric using world. American parents and caregivers are more likely to screw up conversion rates when they give out medicine, sending some children, who are more susceptible to overdoses, to the hospital.

Further, American students have to be trained on two sets of measurements, making basic science education even more difficult.