For distance and mass, zero means no distance and no mass.
For temperature though having none means no kinetic energy of atoms/molecules. It’s absolute zero, the zero Kelvin. So the other units are the weird ones.
But since zero Kelvin isn’t a phenomenon you’ll ever encounter in nature, it makes Kelvin a pretty unappealing scale for everyday life.
And thus we started making shit up…
P.S. My bad Rankine also shakes hands with Kelvin about absolute zero, very demure, very mindful.
When most of the temperature scales were made, they didn’t even know yet that there was a zero, I mean, theoretically, they likely knew or assumed. But they had no way of practically measuring it yet, at the very least.
I do think that as much as it would be weird for a couple of years, it would help a lot in the long run to widely adopt a temperature scale that starts at 0.
Because honestly, the percentage of adults I come across that have no idea how temperature works or what it even is conceptually beyond just “a nice day or a bad day” or “this is the number for cooking this thing” is astonishing.
I knew a girl years ago who thought that the temperatures on her oven must use a different scale than the temperature on her thermometer and whatnot. Because surely nothing could get to 500 degrees fahrenheit and not, like, melt the stove. It’s gotta be a different scale.
For distance and mass, zero means no distance and no mass.
For temperature though having none means no kinetic energy of atoms/molecules. It’s absolute zero, the zero Kelvin. So the other units are the weird ones.
But since zero Kelvin isn’t a phenomenon you’ll ever encounter in nature, it makes Kelvin a pretty unappealing scale for everyday life.
And thus we started making shit up…
P.S. My bad Rankine also shakes hands with Kelvin about absolute zero, very demure, very mindful.
When most of the temperature scales were made, they didn’t even know yet that there was a zero, I mean, theoretically, they likely knew or assumed. But they had no way of practically measuring it yet, at the very least.
I do think that as much as it would be weird for a couple of years, it would help a lot in the long run to widely adopt a temperature scale that starts at 0.
Because honestly, the percentage of adults I come across that have no idea how temperature works or what it even is conceptually beyond just “a nice day or a bad day” or “this is the number for cooking this thing” is astonishing.
I knew a girl years ago who thought that the temperatures on her oven must use a different scale than the temperature on her thermometer and whatnot. Because surely nothing could get to 500 degrees fahrenheit and not, like, melt the stove. It’s gotta be a different scale.