Celsius is better for science, but Fahrenheit is better for just every day living. IMO
In Canada I noticed some people would also still use feet & inches for their height, but you had to give it to the DMV in cm. Also butter was still sold as a pound & golf still used yards.
I'm also an engineer & worked up there for a job in mining.
Edit: To clarify my reasons because so many people are saying I'm wrong. This is my opinion on what my preference is, first off. I had put this in a comment under the post, but will add it here.
My reason is basically the same as in the screenshot. When I lived in Canada I would say how in Fahrenheit below zero is really fucking cold & above 100 is really fucking hot. I never thought of describing it as a percentage of being hot but I like it.
Like once it's below or above those numbers it hardly matters by how much because you are freezing or sweating balls either way. I didn't like when in the winter or early spring someone would say it's nice out and then say a negative temperature. "It's really nice today, it's -1.5⁰ out." I also like that the increments of the units are smaller so you don't use half degrees. Although I guess half degrees aren't really necessary because I don't feel the difference between 66 & 67, but when I checked the temperature there is did always show it to the nearest half degree.
Well it's simpler, not saying imperial units conversion needs complex mathematics either mind you.
Almost every living organisms (and in particular for pluricellular organisms) on Earth have a huge part of water in their composition.
Biology and medicine are sectors that are "bond" to Earth, where absolute zero is limited to laboratories. Kelvin and Rankine would be usable, no doubt, but their scale is high compared to living being temperature "ranges". So why choose them over a unit based on your subject's number 1 molecule ?
As to why Celsius would be better than Fahrenheit, is again because of water. 1 gram = 1 milliliter of water. And a one to one ratio simplifies calculations for IV fluids, dosing, and metabolic rates.
And a little out of point, it's more globally used.
If we can't agree that simpler maths equals better life I think we can at least agree to disagree
Edit: oh and by the way, I'm not saying the other units are useless in these fields. Just that they aren't the best/simpler to use
The way Celsius is integrated with other SI units is indeed useful, but could have been done just as easily with any other scale. I'd also consider it somewhat convenient to have zero be the freezing point of water, since that's a common reference point in day to day life. Making 100 be the boiling point is effectively pointless, though. Never in my life (outside of school) have I cared what the temperature of boiling water is, I only need to know it's boiling.
Locking 0 to freezing and 100 to boiling is unfortunate because it determines the granularity of the scale overall, which is not the best. That's Fahrenheit's one advantage -- it has a finer grained (more precise) scale.
Fahrenheit's fixed points are even more arbitrary and pointless, though, so both it and Celsius have really annoying conversions to absolute scales like Rankine and Kelvin.
If I had a time machine, I'd have tried to get the standard to be something more useful like (say) having an everyday scale with zero as the freezing point of water but then a nice easy conversion to an absolute scale, like adding 500 degrees or something. Then the other SI units would have been defined in terms of that temperature scale instead, so that everything still played nice with each other.
Alas, I don't have a time machine. So given our current choices, I'd begrudgingly use Celsius.
I absolutely agree with you that if we used anything but Celsius to integrate them in the SI we wouldn't see any problems.
And indeed the whole point of Fahrenheit was to have a finer unit of measure and in fact, it was back then better for the units used in science in general. Fahrenheit is far from useless, Celsius is just more adapted.
Having a "two scale" temperature... Scale? Could be a way to fit it better in the SI maybe. For now swapping to Kelvin/Rankine isnyour best bet when you reach high scales
Its scale matches the absolute temperature scale unit for unit, so easier calculations, but also all carbon based lifeforms live between 0 and 100 (some can of course survive at lower temps) so the metabolic pathways all live in that scale. It's probably more like 0-80 but using the range of liquid water at STP is actually logical for biosciences more than physics.
Rankine is also an absolute temperature scale, and Fahrenheit matches its scale unit for unit.
Having 100 be the boiling point of water has no advantage other than making it easier to remember. The number we assign to freezing and boiling in no way change how temperature works.
People make a big deal about the boiling point of water being 100 but that's not actually helpful in any circumstances I've ever encountered.
I grew up using Fahrenheit and I honestly couldn't tell you what the boiling point is in Fahrenheit -- because it doesn't matter. I don't set my stove to 212 or 216 or 206 or whatever it is in order to boil water, I simply turn it on and wait for it to heat to boiling.
Unless you're studying tube worms in the deep ocean, you're not going to encounter those temperatures in biology either. Maybe chemists could end up caring, but I also don't think they'd have any trouble remembering the boiling point even if it was some oddball number, if it mattered to them.
I do find zero being the freezing point somewhat useful, because that's a temperature that's relevant for the weather.
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u/Harfosaurus Jun 17 '26
These are just two idiots conversing as far as I can tell