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).
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?