Except that water boils at different temperatures when exposed to different amounts of pressure.
So this works pretty universally on earth… Near the ground/ocean level (plus or minus a few hundred meters). Once you get outside of that specific condition the numbers move.
The nice thing about celcius and kelvin is that they’re the same scale, but celcius is just shifted 273.15 units. And it’s more intuitive for humans to work with smaller numbers with bigger relative differences. But yes, kelvin would be a lot better to work with, especially considering stuff like doubling temperature (doubling energy) would actually work correctly in kelvin.
But if there’s one thing that makes a lot of sense to base temperature enough for human use, I would indeed say it’s water, because all life uses water, we are completely surrounded by it, and it’s super important to nearly everything we do too.
it can be just as strange to have to think in terms of adjusting for 273.15K for the misleading “freezing point of water” or 298.15K for STP, another arbitrary standard of measurement. Kelvin is no better than Rankine
This touches on something important, which is that Celsius is based on an arbitrary pressure. It’s based on an elevation that suits the region which defined it.
Water is everywhere.
Cooking, weather, etc. You are also water.
Except that water boils at different temperatures when exposed to different amounts of pressure.
So this works pretty universally on earth… Near the ground/ocean level (plus or minus a few hundred meters). Once you get outside of that specific condition the numbers move.
So yes, fairly arbitrary.
Let’s all switch to Kelvin.
The nice thing about celcius and kelvin is that they’re the same scale, but celcius is just shifted 273.15 units. And it’s more intuitive for humans to work with smaller numbers with bigger relative differences. But yes, kelvin would be a lot better to work with, especially considering stuff like doubling temperature (doubling energy) would actually work correctly in kelvin.
But if there’s one thing that makes a lot of sense to base temperature enough for human use, I would indeed say it’s water, because all life uses water, we are completely surrounded by it, and it’s super important to nearly everything we do too.
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This touches on something important, which is that Celsius is based on an arbitrary pressure. It’s based on an elevation that suits the region which defined it.