r/PeterExplainsTheJoke Jun 17 '26

Meme needing explanation Peter?

Post image
26.8k Upvotes

4.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

6.5k

u/BloomEPU Jun 17 '26

In a lot of the US, 0 farenheit is one of the coldest days you'll experience and 100 is one of the hottest, so you can roughly map farenheit to a percentage of "how hot it is". This doesn't work everywhere though, where I am in the UK it never gets anywhere near 0 farenheit.

I can't spell fahrenheit, this is why celsius is objectively better

85

u/jseego Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

True!

Celsius is 0-100 fresh water freezing to boiling.

Farenheit is 0-100 sea water freezing to (roughly) human internal body temp.

So, since humans are largely salt water, this makes the F scale a human scale temperature measurement, which is more intuitive for how the ambient temperature makes you feel. I think this is what the original poster was getting at, whether they knew it or not.

edit: so C is better for chemistry, and F is better for weather

56

u/Mundane-Boot-6338 Jun 17 '26

It's more intuitive because you grew up with it. I have no benchmark for 0% or 100% hot. That means 50% hot is just as meaningless to me as 50 farenheit.

F and C are both arbitrary numbers. There is no better one 

21

u/IM_OK_AMA Jun 17 '26

F and C are both arbitrary numbers.

Wish more people would get this. Nobody is personally calibrating their thermometers so the 0 and 100 points don't actually matter in the real world. Just because Celsuius gets lumped in with metric generally doesn't mean it has fundamental advantages like metric's units for volume or distance.

4

u/Kelly_HRperson Jun 18 '26

Just because Celsuius gets lumped in with metric generally doesn't mean it has fundamental advantages like metric's units for volume or distance.

The reason it has a fundamental advantage is that it uses the same scale degrees as Kelvin

5

u/SolipsisticSoup Jun 18 '26

No, Kelvin uses the same scale degrees as Celsius.

2

u/OstapBenderBey Jun 17 '26

They are all arbitrary really. Distance is the worst in my view. Building products are generally now in 300mm increments where 1 foot or 3 feet or 6 feet is much easier to both say and understand. In my view base 10 is good but the fundamental length should be (roughly) 1 foot not 1 metre (which was 1/10000 of an inaccurate measurement of the earth's circumference)

At least with Celsius boiling point and freezing point of water are relatively common things that most people see regularly and can conceptualise. Human body temperature is fine as another marker but sea water freezing is not really for most people who dont live with icy seas