this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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As someone who grew up with Fahrenheit, it's an arbitrary scale. 0 is the "coldest thing" that he could create in a lab at the time, basically a bath of ice and salt water, 100-ish was supposed to be the temperature of a healthy human body. They are unrelated things. It has nothing to do with "what we feel", people only think that because they grew up with it. The same can be said for all imperial measurements because there is no other way to say that 12 inches to a foot and 3 feet to a yard is "intuitive".
Celsius putting freezing at 0 and boiling at 100 (at sea level) are related to each other because it's measuring the temperature of water the entire time and then setting that as a the literal metric we use to measure other things.
I switched to Celsius for a couple of years and after going through a couple of seasons or two I had an intuitive feeling for what a value would feel like. It made perfect sense. I only stopped using it because my phone switched back one day for some reason and I was tired of having to convert to freedom units to avoid getting odd reactions from people.
I didn't say it did. I just said it's more useful for that. Whether it was on purpose or not, 100 and 0 are when it's dangerous. Before those it can still be, but beyond them you really need to be careful.
Celsius is also arbitrary. There's no particular reason water, at sea level, is used for the scale. It was just chosen. If you're measuring water, it's great. Otherwise, there's nothing that makes it "better" than F. It's not easier to convert to scale to higher or lower numbers or anything, which is what the metric system usually has an advantage with. They're both just scales.
I've been playing Stationeers a lot lately. (It's a game about managing a station on another planet, and simulates liquids and gasses really well, following the ideal gas law, and phase changes, and all that good stuff. I highly recommend it, and the devs are great.) In that you use Celsius and Kelvin, with you often needing kK or even larger. It wouldn't make sense to use F, because it's hard to switch between F and K, but C and K are the same, with K just being 274.15 higher. I have no issue with C, but this type of use is the one place it's better, and no one I know would ever have to do this.