Weather forecasting software or TV shows use two major temperature scales, Celsius and Fahrenheit. Why are there two? Isn’t a single temperature scale enough? Well I don’t know about these, but I can tell you why Fahrenheit is mostly useless and unnecessary by comparing it with its two major “competitors”.
Celsius is one of the most commonly used Temperature scales in the world for everyday life situation. It’s great because it is based on water, the most familiar molecule to just about any human in the planet, and also we are quite familiar with its three states, namely ice, water and vapor. Below 0°C water starts to freeze, above 100°C water starts to vaporize and between these two points it’s in its liquid form, nice and round numbers right?
Kelvin is another great temperature scale for number of reasons. The greatest thing about is that its starting, 0°K also called “absolute zero”, is the coldest temperature that can be possibly, or impossibly, reached. Its starting point is based upon a fundamental limit of our universe. For that reason it is used in science community very often. For example, you can easily encounter Kelvin in chemistry or even in electronics (Resistor noise). Scientific formulas usually uses Kelvin possibly because of the very fact that Kelvin temperature scale relates to the absolute zero, so when you use Kelvin you usually don’t have to deal with any conversion and formula looks neat and beautiful. Here are some formulae for you to compare three of these temperature scales.
These are some of the reasons why I don’t like Fahrenheit. The lack of definite starting point troubles me the most basically and I also don’t like “not-so-simple” conversion to Kelvin because when applying temperature to a formula most of the time you make measurement in Celsius of Fahrenheit, that is why straightforward conversion is important.
I think most people are going to argue that Fahrenheit has better resolution compared to Celsius. It might be correct, but you can always use decimal points. In some cases you might actually make the accuracy of your measurement worse hoping to get narrower temperature steps with Fahrenheit scale. Let’s think about thermocouples for a second. They are most likely calibrated it with Kelvin scale. When you have the calibration data imported to your temperature measurement device and let your device do the conversion to Fahrenheit, due to the limited number of bits in your instruments you may actually introduce calculation error. It is due to the fact this particular conversion includes an irrational number (5/9). This is not the case for Celsius.
It’s time to move on. EMBRACE CELSIUS AND LET FAHRENHEIT DIE!!!
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