I get it now

YAMAPIKARIYA@lemmyfi.com to Memes@sopuli.xyz – 454 points –
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It's not like you need 100 degrees of granularity in telling the temperature of the weather. Also, 0 degrees Celsius is by far the most influential temperature in day to day life, at least if you live somewhere it occurs.

boiling water is also a fairly important temperature, and it doesn't take much brainpower to figure out roughly where between freezing and boiling you like to be.

Plus it's nice to have the reference points be quite objective, you can create a celsius thermometer that's reasonably accurate without much work, and i feel like it makes relating to temperatures outside the scale easier too.

The amount of energy it takes to bring a volume of water from freezing to boiling is plainly observable and has a nice size for comparing to e.g. the melting point of metals.

If we could start from scratch, I would define an absolute temperature scale where water freezes at 500, roughly 1.83x the kelvin scale.

So 4xx is freezing, and the max survivable temperature is around 570. (Water boils at 683, but freezing and boiling can't both be round numbers on an absolute scale.)