Why Fahrenheit Actually Makes Sense
Celsius is the obvious temperature scale of choice when conducting scientific experiments. Water freezes at 0. It boils at 100. It is beautiful and simple and has a lot going for it, not least of which is adoption by most of the world. And let's not forget Kelvin, the preferred scale for temperature measurements in astronomy, which is the same scale as Celsius but starts with 0 at absolute zero to avoid pesky negative numbers.
But there is actually a lot to be said for the seemingly arbitrary temperature scale we cling to in the United States. Sure, water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit and freezes at 32 degrees, which seems utterly random. But consider everyday living. When it's 0 degrees Fahrenheit out, it's damn cold, and when it's 100 degrees, it's damn hot, and both these temperatures actually occur regularly in the populated regions of the world. When using Celsius, you need to dip into negatives for common below-freezing temperatures, and you never approach anything near 100 degrees Celsius for ambient outdoor temperatures.
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There is also the fact that Fahrenheit is a more precise scale than Celsius, meaning the difference in temperature between each degree is smaller. Fifty degrees Fahrenheit is 10 degrees Celsius, but 51 degrees Fahrenheit is 10.56 degrees Celsius (an increase of 10 degrees Celsius equals an increase of 18 degrees Fahrenheit). So you can be more accurate when measuring temperatures using Fahrenheit without resorting to fractions and decimals.
Finally, there is the fact that Fahrenheit is not an arbitrary scale at all. As this illuminating video from the YouTube channel Veritasium shows, the history of Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit and his temperature scale is steeped in scientific study.
Fahrenheit, who perfected the use of mercury in thermometers and was inducted into the British Royal Society for his work, first borrowed the temperature scale of Ole Rømer, the famed Danish astronomer who used eclipses of Jupiter's moons to measure the speed of light for the first time in 1676. Rømer's scale used 60 degrees for the boiling point of water, a logical choice for an astronomer who is accustomed to measuring things in terms of angular degrees. (Sixty is a useful number because it has so many factors and can be divided equally into many different groups, which is one reason we have adopted it for our scale of time.)
Farhenheit made some alterations to Rømer's scale to avoid fractions at the freezing point of water and average body temperature. Then he decided to multiply the whole thing by 4. Why? First of all, that gives you a more precise scale with smaller units, as previously discussed. Secondly, mercury expands slightly as its temperature rises, and at the current Fahrenheit scale, a one-degree increase in temperature increases the volume of mercury by exactly 1 part in 10,000.
Coincidence? Perhaps. Or perhaps the work of a meticulous scientific mind working to build the most accurate thermometer possible with the available materials.
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