this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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Science Memes

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submitted 2 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] psud@aussie.zone 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Celcius degrees are quite a bit larger than Fahrenheit degrees. 0 to 100C is much larger than 0 to 100F so I don't get what you mean by Celcius covering about half of Fahrenheit. In any case neither scale runs out of numbers high or low

[–] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

my main point was that accuracy matters a lot less with fahrenheit, because it's so much broader. a range of about 10 degrees fahrenheit is the average subjectively experienced "change" in temperature, at least on the higher end, where there's more difference between the individual numbers. On the cold side there's a lot less variance as it meets at about -40 in both systems.

In any case neither scale runs out of numbers high or low

this is very true though, hard to run out of numbers when you can just make more up, although there is an ultimate limit in either direction, due to what temperature actually measures. That's a physics thing though.

[–] psud@aussie.zone 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The words you are looking for are that Fahrenheit is more precise. But it's not as there are an infinity of numbers between any two integers.

My thermometer at work which I use for health and safety stuff reports temperature to two decimal places. Had we wanted more precision we could have gone with twenty decimal places. In too big or too small metric units we use multipliers - metres are too small for long distances so we use kilometres (thousands of metres), metres are too big for construction so we use millimetres (thousandths of metres)

Where Celcius degrees are too big, people (scientists, since whole degrees or a single decimal is enough for everyone else) use milikelvins

[–] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 months ago

The words you are looking for are that Fahrenheit is more precise. But it’s not as there are an infinity of numbers between any two integers.

yeah and you could make a temperature scale call it fuckwit and make water freeze at -1, and water room temperature at 0, and then make it boil at 1. I don't know why you would want to do that though.

My thermometer at work which I use for health and safety stuff reports temperature to two decimal places. Had we wanted more precision we could have gone with twenty decimal places. In too big or too small metric units we use multipliers - metres are too small for long distances so we use kilometres (thousands of metres), metres are too big for construction so we use millimetres (thousandths of metres)

well you wouldn't go with twenty decimal spaces because after you get past about 4 decimals, it starts to become inconsequential, and you should really just use sci no anyway.

Where Celcius degrees are too big, people (scientists, since whole degrees or a single decimal is enough for everyone else) use milikelvins

fascinating that you propose this, because this is literally the opposite of what i said lol.