farenheit scale

[mollykins]

Is the above temperature scale based on anything? For example celsius has a 0 of water freezing and 100 for water boiling and kelvins has it's 0 at the point where even atoms stop moving or something like that.

[jackthehat]

I thought everyone knew about the Farenheit Scale.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit

[mollykins]

Wikipedia still doesn't answer my question though . . .

[chakka35]

It does, Molly. Read it again. For example he fixes the temperature of the human body at 100 degrees and works from there.

[mollykins]

ahhh . . . so 37c is 100f?

[LazyGun]

On the original Fahrenheit scale, body temperature was indeed 100 - but the fahrenheit scale was subsequently revised to offer a more standardised difference between the freezing and boiling point of water, and on the revised scale body temp in fahrenheit is the well known 98.6

Mildly interesting, but not especially useful, is the fact that Celcius original scale, he placed boiling point at 0 and freezing point at 100, which was later reversed.

[mollykins]

so it was reverse as in a lower number meant a higher temp, which msut have been confusing, no wonder they changed it.

[wildwood]

Not as confusing as Fahrenheit Molly. 10°F is -12°C.

[Prudie]

and -40 is the only time they are the same

[gingejbee]

Agree Wildwood; I wish my BBC local radio weather forecasters would just drop F completely. They insist on giving both - must think we're all morons. It must be thirty years since C has been in common use.

[chakka35]

I never use the word 'Celsius', for two reasons:

I remember how we laughed out loud at school when told that Celsius had water boiling at zero and freezing at 100, and I can't get over it.

The word 'Centigrade' says it all, meaning 'on a scale of a hundred'. Celsius is just a name and explains nothing.

[gingejbee]

chakkaa: That's true, but lots of different scales are named after the people who thought of them - and that goes for scientific laws and hypotheses, too.

[Lborobrewer]

Celsius is used because it is named after the person who developed the scale, in the same way as Fahrenheit, Newton, Ampere, Volt and Joule have had physical units named after them.
It is right to refer to a temperature as being so many degrees Celsius, degrees Fahrenheit; but it is incorrect to refer to a temperature as being so many degrees Kelvin, it is simply so many Kelvin.

[chakka35]

gingejbee and Lboro, I am well aware, having had a fine scientific education and being once an electronic engineer, that many units are named after such scientists. But that is usually when the full definition of the unit would be long-winded and cumbersome.

But 'centigrade' is a short, completely defining, word which needs no back-up or substitution.

I was never quite happy with 'Hertz' for 'cycles per second' which was usually abbreviated to 'cycles'. A '50-cycle mains supply' is explanatory whereas 'a 50-hertz mains supply' is meaningless until you look up 'hertz'.

[Teddio]

Centigrade is a scale that goes from zero to one hundred and could apply to any arbitrary temperature scale. The Celsius scale is definitive.