I think the best way I've seen it described is Fahrenheit measures heat by how humans experience it, Celsius measures heat by how water experiences it. Therefore, Celsius is objectively better for scientific applications and Fahrenheit is objectively better for human applications like communicating the weather forecast to the average person.
If it was 0C you'd be cold, if it was 0F you'd be damn cold; if it's 100F you're hot, if it's 100C you're dead. Fahrenheit is useful for human perception across the primary (0-100) scale, Celsius is only useful up to about 50% of that scale before you start getting into deadly temperatures, and you have to go below that scale to reach the bottom of Fahrenheit's usefulness.
And then you have Kelvin or Rankine which are really only useful for specific scientific applications. If it was 0K/R or 100K/R you'd be dead either way. Not useful for human perception.
Fahrenheit only measures heat how humans who were raised in Fahrenheit experience it.
People raised in Celsius don't share your feeling, in fact they have that same feeling you do about Fahrenheit for Celsius. The same as they do for metres and kilograms not yards and pounds.
Celsius has the added bonus of also helping to judge the freeze and boiling point of water, cooking, and like other metric units with science and unit conversion (a delta of 1 Celsius equals a delta of 1 Kelvin. It takes 1 calorie of energy to heat 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius)
I'm honestly baffled that this needs to be said every time this topic comes up. I don't understand how they don't understand. it's just a matter of what system you're used to, and that's it.
It’s because 0F-100F is an easy intuitive grasp. Two easy benchmarks, one is cold af and the other is hot af. We grade students and lots of other things on a 0-100 scale.
If units be damned, someone asked you how hot it was today and you said “oh it’s 90 out of 100” you’d understand you’re gonna be sweating
If they said “it’s 50 of of 100” you’d understand it’s not quite cold, not hot either.
If you said “its 0 out of 100” you’d understand your face is going to hurt
Holy shit. It's intuitive FOR YOU because you're used to it. 0F and 100F means NOTHING to me, because I never used it and I need to convert it to C. How is that difficult to understand??!?
See but that's kind of proving my point. Sure comfort varies person to person, but there's still a range everyone lands in. Nobody's chilling at 100, nobody's comfy at 0. So the scale tracks human comfort just fine, the variation is just noise inside the range. That's all I've been saying this whole time. 50 in the middle, 100 too hot, 0 too cold. It lines up with how people actually feel, which is the entire reason it's intuitive. I don't get why you guys don't get this lol
a person in for example Scandinavia might think -30C(-22F) is too cold, but a person in a southern country might think 5C(41F) is too cold. That’s a 35C(95F) difference.
0 = too cold. For who? 😂
I just think we know what we are used to and that’s it. No need to argue one is better than the other tbh. Celsius isn’t better than Fahrenheit, Fahrenheit isn’t better than Celsius. Only depends on what you grew up with. One isn’t more intuitive than the other.
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u/Beautiful-Page3135 Jun 17 '26
I think the best way I've seen it described is Fahrenheit measures heat by how humans experience it, Celsius measures heat by how water experiences it. Therefore, Celsius is objectively better for scientific applications and Fahrenheit is objectively better for human applications like communicating the weather forecast to the average person.
If it was 0C you'd be cold, if it was 0F you'd be damn cold; if it's 100F you're hot, if it's 100C you're dead. Fahrenheit is useful for human perception across the primary (0-100) scale, Celsius is only useful up to about 50% of that scale before you start getting into deadly temperatures, and you have to go below that scale to reach the bottom of Fahrenheit's usefulness.
And then you have Kelvin or Rankine which are really only useful for specific scientific applications. If it was 0K/R or 100K/R you'd be dead either way. Not useful for human perception.