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[theauthors]

?

probably its because i am not understanding something, but your question doesn't make sense to me. what do you mean by saying that the f scale is more accurate than the celsius scale? just because there are 100 degrees celcius to 180 f? if this is the case, is there any reason you dont want to use fractions? for example, linnea might be curious to know that in russia normal human body temperature is said to be 36.6 C. 37 would be a slight fever

as far as i can tell, neither is more accurate because there's a one-to-one correspondence between the two scales which you can figure out from F = (180/100)C + 32

i dont think celcius is an international standard because of kelvin scale. im pretty sure the kelvin scale was derived from the celsius scale. you guys ever heard of the rankine scale?

my best guess for why celsius was adopted as an international standard is because of how convenient the reference points of water freezing and water boiling are. this is because of two things: water is really abundant and easy to come accross, and during these phase changes its temperature remains constant until the phase change is complete, so that you can take your time to measure the reference temperatures. in this way celcius is more convenient than the f scale, i think

[littlefallsmets]

Well, in the space between freezing and boiling, there are 180 lines of demarkin' on F and 100 lines of demarkin' on C.

And so... if you don't have fractions or decimals on hand, yeah, F is more "precise".

A lot of thermometers only go by degrees, no decimals, and so... yeah. On a cheap thermometer, F is theoretically more useful.

But... again... if you're doing something where a degree and a half's difference is so important, just get a better thermometer, either way.

[theauthors]

lol yeah i agree with your last sentence. two cheap thermometers are probably going to have a difference in their reading thats roughly as big as the precision you gain from having more notches i had to use three thermometers for an experiment at one point, and all three had a different reading in the same medium. as far as i can remember, in a water-and-ice bath, one read -1 C, one 0 C and one 3 C (!).

this precision thing still doesnt make much sense to me though. why can't you eyeball the scale in 0.5 degrees C for example voila - the celcius scale is now more precise. edit: my bad, this argument sucks i see what you mean

[jaydub]

This is probably less than astonishing, but it occurs to me that 180 degrees is half a circle - and that in Olden-Tymes such devices probably used a pointer going around a semicircle as the readout.  There's some consonance with clock faces and trigonometric arcs that probably made the scale seem very intuitive to the adopters.

[theinevitable]

authors, I do not understand any of what you just said.

if you can estimate to 1/2 of the measure indicated, wouldn't fahrenheit still be more visually accurate, since you could estimate to half a degree, just like celsius?

[theauthors]

sorry

i agree with lfm that both scales are adequate to get a rough idea of what temperature it is outside or what temperature your oven is or another practical matter. in these matters a difference of a degree is not much. and besides this, there are limits to how precise the thermometer itself is and how well it was calibrated.

but if we idealize the situation and say that we can measure a temperature to a large accuracy, im trying to say that i dont see how one is more precise than the other, because you can covert any measurment from one to the other.

if we accept that the two scales are equivalent in terms of how precise they are, the reason why celsius was adopted as an international standard is not that either is more precise. my best guess is that it was adopted because of the more convenient reference temperatures that were used to define the scale. as far as i can tell, this was what the original poster's question was about.

[Arachno-capitalist]

This is probably less than astonishing, but it occurs to me that 180 degrees is half a circle - and that in Olden-Tymes such devices probably used a pointer going around a semicircle as the readout.  There's some consonance with clock faces and trigonometric arcs that probably made the scale seem very intuitive to the adopters.

I like this idea better than the others. Lets start a whisper campaign for the semi circle hypothesis.

[Carlos del Vaca]

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