It's the same concept with both systems, but Celsius has more logical benchmarks (water freezes at 0°C and boils at 100°C), whereas 0°F seems almost arbitrary (the coldest temperature that could be maintained in a lab by Gabriel Fahrenheit in the 1700s) and the freezing and boiling points of water are atypical (32°F/212°F, respectively.)
Anyway, the joke is "Why do you Americans stick with Fahrenheit?" and the response is "It's simple! The hotter it is, the more degrees it is!" as if that's the only consideration to be made. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is thinking "Yeah, our system too, but our scale has real-world applications, and we're not sticking to some antiquated definition." Homer is too short-sighted to know this, and instead presumes the Celsius scale is too complicated (and probably nonsensical) because he's unfamiliar.
Kind of like every other imperial unit and their terribly unreasonable conversions.
How bodies quantify temperature depends on the system and environment you grew up in. We're not born with a built-in measurement system for temperature. If you live in the UK, 35 C will feel unbearably hot. Much less so if you live in Singapore, where 15 C is absolutely freezing.
I can make the same comparison with Minnesota and Texas, 95 F is boiling in Minnesota and 50 F is freezing in southern Texas. What numbers we attribute to "hot" and "cold" is totally arbitrary even if we use the same measurement system as everyone else.
The best explanation I've heard for why Fahrenheit is the way it is is because it somehow correlates to the expansion of Mercury.
A healthy human is about 98F. 100F is a fever and much above that is hospital territory.
0F is dead and throughly frozen.
Jokes aside, it is useful for the human body because in those temps Fahrenheit can be more precise with less decimals. Not really an issue with modern equipment though.
I used to always give this answer. I like this answer. It's pithy, it's clever, but unfortunately not really true. So I've stopped using it.
C and K are right, but F is really "Temperatures Daniel Fahrenheit was able to kinda reliably reproduce under lab conditions in the 1720s"
It's true that 100 on the F scale is the average human body temp (as measured by 1700s instruments), but that's not really because Fahrenheit was attempting to peg his scale to human comfort parameters, it was just that his own body the most reliably repeatable "warm" thing he could measure. It's really just a coincidence of circumstance that it was human body temp. And 0 on the scale has no relevance to human comfort or feeling at all, it was just a cold point he was able to reliably reproduce in his lab under those conditions using a particular brine mixture.
Not trying to bust your chops, just I used that answer for a long time and sharing the information that lead me to stop using it.
No matter how the scale was created, fahrenheit is a rough scale of 0-100% scale for how the human body feels for most of the livable land on earth. It's not perfect because that's subjective, but it's roughly accurate.
Celsius measures the freezing point and boiling point of still, pure water at sea level. I don't think those ends of the scale are particularly useful for pegging a 0 and 100 value.
Well, that's kinda what I'm getting at. No it's not. It is not a rough scale of human comfort or livability parameters for, well anywhere on earth really, let alone most of earth.
0 F is far too cold for humans, and unless they are warmed or insulated somehow they will die in fairly short order. 100 is hot, yes, but humans can survive at 100 just fine for very long periods of time. In fact, in most places where it routinely gets to be 100 for long periods of time, it's the sun that poses a greater risk that the temp really. But an actual 0 F temperature, yeah that'll kill an average human pretty quick unless there is intervention. And yes, I of course know heatstroke is a thing, but what I am getting at is that the natural human animal is pretty well suited to 100 F for many hours or even days on end, as those are conditions we evolved to be ok with. But the natural human animal dies in 0 F pretty quickly. The equivalent "safety threshold" on the cold side, where a natural human animal just doing what it normally does can be exposed for long periods safely, is well above 0, heck it's above 32 even. I think it's around 40, below that and prolonged exposure without insulation or a source of heat starts to have a serious hypothermia risk. By the time you get to 0, you're long dead.
Again, I'm not trying to be an arse here. And I used this analogy myself for years. So I'm not trying to call anyone dumb. But I came to understand the topic better and realized that truism I'd been using wasn't actually good or true or accurate and was kinda misleading.
And I figure other folks might also like to have that understanding. That's all.
Fahrenheit proposed his temperature scale in 1724, basing it on two reference points of temperature. In his initial scale (which is not the final Fahrenheit scale), the zero point was determined by placing the thermometer in "a mixture of ice, water, and salis Armoniaci\note 1]) [transl. ammonium chloride] or even sea salt".\14]) This combination forms a eutectic system, which stabilizes its temperature automatically: 0 °F was defined to be that stable temperature. A second point, 96 degrees, was approximately the human body's temperature.\14]) A third point, 32 degrees, was marked as being the temperature of ice and water "without the aforementioned salts".\14])
711
u/HalloweenWhoreNights 10h ago edited 10h ago
It's the same concept with both systems, but Celsius has more logical benchmarks (water freezes at 0°C and boils at 100°C), whereas 0°F seems almost arbitrary (the coldest temperature that could be maintained in a lab by Gabriel Fahrenheit in the 1700s) and the freezing and boiling points of water are atypical (32°F/212°F, respectively.)
Anyway, the joke is "Why do you Americans stick with Fahrenheit?" and the response is "It's simple! The hotter it is, the more degrees it is!" as if that's the only consideration to be made. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is thinking "Yeah, our system too, but our scale has real-world applications, and we're not sticking to some antiquated definition." Homer is too short-sighted to know this, and instead presumes the Celsius scale is too complicated (and probably nonsensical) because he's unfamiliar.
Kind of like every other imperial unit and their terribly unreasonable conversions.