this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
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F and C are both made up points, not absolute values. C is great, if what you care about is what water is doing. F is great, if you care about how something feels to a human (not saying you can't memorize new numbers, but 0 and 100 being dangerous is simple).
If you want an actual "best" temperature scale, use Kelvin. 0 is no energy. It actually has a fundamental base. If you argue that temperatures that are useful to humans are too hard to memorize, then you're making the argument against C too (or F when dealing with water).
F has nothing to do with how a human feels. 0 f was literally just a very cold day that happened once. You're just used to it, the same way people who use c are used to it and feel it very intuitively. A scale that actually was human would probably be logarithmic since we dont feel temperature linearly, and the 0 would be at 20c ~68 f since that is the temperature that's most comfortable for people, with positive numbers being hot temperatures and negative numbers being cold
Yes both are made up. As everything we use to count or measure is.
However it depends how they were made up.
Fahrenheit was set to 0 on the lowest temperature someone could achieve at time. And 100 was set to the body temperature of the human body. Totally two comparable points of measurement.
Celsius uses the melting point of water as 0.and then uses, revolutionary, the same water when it changes its state from liquid to gas.
It's not the coldest someone could achieve at the time. It was chosen because it's a reliable low temperature that will consistently be produced by a particular brine solution.
That doesn't really make it better, does it? How does that make it better? It sounds like it makes it better, but functionally what's better about it? What functionally is made superior by defining it as two stages of one thing rather than stages of different things? As long as the temperatures are reliably reproduced, it's functionally the same. Sure, being a measure of water does make it more useful when you care about water (at sea level, and only at sea level), as I said before. It doesn't generally make it better though.
It is better because it uses 2 times water as reference point.
Not one thing and then a completely different one.
We could for example set the 0 degrees at the freezing point of alcohol and 100 at the boiling point.
Or 0 at the boiling point of argon and 100 at the temperature it turns into plasma.
Both of these fictional scales are better than Fahrenheit.
You didn't answer why that makes it better. What functionality does it give us that we don't have if we use two reference points from different things. I'm pretty confident there aren't any. This is proven especially true because that's not how Celsius is defined anymore, and it didn't lose any functionality. It sounds more "pure", or whatever, but that doesn't make it better. Do you have an actual reason that it improves its functionality?
They are both made up but what is the fahrenheit? Where does the scale start? How much does it increment by? How does it relate to other units?
Celcius starts at the melting point of water at sea level and each increment is 1% of the required change to turn water from frozen to boiling. This is arbitrary yes, but the importance is not if it's arbitrary but that it is a description of a physical property in our world that can be experimentally repeated, tested and verified. No authority can arbitrarily decide that a degree Celcius is actually different from what it was last year.
There's a reason that all imperial units are scientifically described by their relation to their metric counterpart and it's because metric units are based on physical properties of the universe around us and so we can measure them as opposed to just define them.
0F is the same, but for brine. 100F was what was believed to be body temperature (still, close enough).
They both can. Notably, the definitions that you and I both gave aren't actually how they're defined anymore. They're both defined using Kelvin, because that's the one that's actually more valid. C and F are just defined as points on that scale. An authority literally did decide it's a different value than years before, as the pressure at sea level is somewhat variable. They decided to use universal constants, that K is defined with, to define both of these scales.
See above. You're thinking of SI units, not metric. They're mostly the same, except notably the SI unit for temperature is Kelvin, not Celsius.
I always thought that was funny fixing point. It makes sense in a medical setting, but in everyday use?
Oh sure, let me just describe the weather outside by comparing to the temperature inside my butthole.
Let's cook this roast in an oven that's as hot as 4 buttholes.