• MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Except that water boils at different temperatures when exposed to different amounts of pressure.

      So this works pretty universally on earth… Near the ground/ocean level (plus or minus a few hundred meters). Once you get outside of that specific condition the numbers move.

      So yes, fairly arbitrary.

      Let’s all switch to Kelvin.

      • SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        The nice thing about celcius and kelvin is that they’re the same scale, but celcius is just shifted 273.15 units. And it’s more intuitive for humans to work with smaller numbers with bigger relative differences. But yes, kelvin would be a lot better to work with, especially considering stuff like doubling temperature (doubling energy) would actually work correctly in kelvin.

        But if there’s one thing that makes a lot of sense to base temperature enough for human use, I would indeed say it’s water, because all life uses water, we are completely surrounded by it, and it’s super important to nearly everything we do too.

      • Deme@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Sure, but the vast majority of people live in low lying areas and even then it doesn’t shift that drastically. You need to climb a mountain to see the difference when it comes to applications of daily life.

        Although now that I think about it. The same criticism applies to pretty much every definition of temperature that is based on the behaviour of matter. This also applies to Kelvin. Temperature is a property of matter and every type of matter behaves differently.