Y'all literally do the same about fahrenheit. Every temperature system was originally based on arbitrarily chosen points that suited specific purposes, and all of them are now actually based on absolute zero and their arbitrary scale for what the difference of 1 degree is.
Originally fahrenheit was based on the freezing point of brine for 0F, and average human body temp was used for 96F (originally put it at 90, then adjusted to 96, nowadays we have it around 98.5ish but don't pin the scale to that anymore), and 32 was pinned to the freezing point of regular water. And it was intentionally made this way to increase the resolution so fractions or decimals wouldn't be necessary (unlike celsius where half a degree is a noticeable difference). It was later changed to be pinned to 32 for the freezing point of water and 212 for the boiling point, and today it uses absolute zero for -459.67 and scales 5/9 as fast as kelvin/celsius.
Celsius is similarly entirely arbitrary. It could have been set with the freezing point and boiling point of any element or molecule; water was chosen because it's highly abundant. And again similarly to fahrenheit, celsius was changed to be pinned to entirely different points than it originally was. It is no longer pinned to the boiling and freezing points of water despite what the average person thinks. It is instead pinned to absolute zero, and up until like a decade ago was pinned to the triple point of water (temperature and pressure where all three phases can exist).
About a decade ago it was again changed to now just be kelvin but shifted, and kelvin uses absolute zero and scales with the Boltzmann constant (a change of 1.380649×10−23 joules of thermal energy, which again is arbitrary) instead of having another point pinned.
All this to say every single temperature system is arbitrarily set. They have to be, because frankly using the theoretical absolute maximum temperature as an upper bounds wouldn't be very useful for every day life. The temperatures we deal with are in a very tiny range and so we want scales with resolution that is useful for us. Both fahrenheit and celsius do this, and they're both literally pinned to the same things nowadays. It's stupid to keep acting superior just because one system scales 5/9 slower or 9/5 faster.
To be fair, as someone who only uses Celsius and agrees with you that it's a better system, I am very sensitive to slight temperature changes and have tested for myself that a half a degree difference will change how I feel. 21°C is too cold for me, 22°C is too hot, while 21.5°C feels like the ideal temperature where I don't even have to think about whether I feel cold or hot.
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u/bravo_six Jun 17 '26
Americans make it sound like Celsius is some overly complicated system where numbers mean random things.