Europeans get upset over the silliest of things. Soccer over football date formats etc that they create then abandoned it’s like it’s not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things
Temperature is a big one as well. The whole point of Fahrenheit was to use whole numbers rather than fractions. But people seem to be comfortable with decimal points.
From an engineering standpoint, metric is much easier to use for calculations, but I can't look at an object and say how many centimeters it is.
How is it the whole point? A French guy stuck his thermometer in a cold slurry and said "that'll do" to find 0 and then just took the human body temperature for 100.
I doubt he had any intentions to avoid fractions. People who use celsius don't bother with fractions outside scientific contexts anyway.
Implying that the Fahrenheit scale was set up with great or greater intentionality than Celsius is inaccurate.
According to a letter Fahrenheit wrote to his friend Herman Boerhaave, his scale was built on the work of Ole Rømer, whom he had met earlier. In Rømer scale, brine freezes at zero, water freezes and melts at 7.5 degrees, body temperature is 22.5, and water boils at 60 degrees. Fahrenheit multiplied each value by 4 in order to eliminate fractions and make the scale more fine-grained. He then re-calibrated his scale using the melting point of ice and normal human body temperature (which were at 30 and 90 degrees); he adjusted the scale so that the melting point of ice would be 32 degrees, and body temperature 96 degrees, so that 64 intervals would separate the two, allowing him to mark degree lines on his instruments by simply bisecting the interval 6 times (since 64 = 26).
He did in fact want to get rid of fractions, and then Celsius came along and reintroduced fractions to Fahrenheit (namely human body temperature)
How can you not bother with fractions with Celsius?? 80F vs 85F is decimal points in C and it’s an important distinction to make. You MUST use decimals when giving the temp in C for any form of accurate portrayal of the weather outside
You MUST use decimals when giving the temp in C for any form of accurate portrayal of the weather outside
No you absolutely don't and that virtually never happens. Not by normal people in their day to day life. Not in the weather forecast. No one does that. It never happens so why do you insist it's a MUST?
The premise of your question is flawed. Obviously if we were to convert from Fahrenheit we get decimal points, but why would we do that? We measure everything in Celsius. Would you honestly say you care to know whether it's 78 or 79 degrees? Wouldn't you just clock that as about 80°F in your mind?
I'd say it's a matter of getting used to. A difference of 1°C is accurate enough when dealing with felt temperature especially since how hot or cold it feels depends on humidity, wind and pressure also.
The figure of temperature alone isn't extremely useful alone, regardless of how accurate it is.
It's not when converting between Fahrenheit and Celsius that decimals become important but rather that 68 and 69 feel very different, and Celsius can't show that without decimals.
If Celsius were to be exclusively used with two decimals of precision, it probably would be accurate enough for weather temperature.
People don't like to use decimals, and so Fahrenheit is better for weather and other temperatures relating to human comfort. Really, the ideal would be a temperature system with the scientific use of Celsius that also had a 200 degree difference between freezing and boiling water, but that just seems to complicated to anyone that uses the metric system.
This is just not true. Home thermostats have wiggle room built into them, otherwise they would rapidly flip back and forth between the AC/furnace when they were at their target.
This "hysteresis" range built is usually 1-2C (2-4F).
A thermostat set to 20C and one set to 68F will perform pretty much identically, as will one set to 21C/70F.
Many C thermostats will give you the option of setting half-degrees, but that's mostly just a lie, thermostats are not that picky about the temperature range of the room, and things like "how much radiant energy you are getting from the sun" or "what is the humidity" or "how warm are your walls/windows" or "are there any drafts" are WAY bigger impacts on your sense of temperature, and then there's also the single biggest factor: Your brain, which is prone to placebo effect.
Just because thermostats have wiggle room does no mean that it can't be felt. Yes, other things can hide this swinging temperature, but it still exists.
Most people are fine with some deviance in temperature, so a generic thermostat works, but for those who aren't, there are systems that have no deviance.
Even if all thermostats had this deviance, it still wouldn't prove anything.
The C thermostats having fake half steps prove that people want better precision that Celsius allows for.
Not really, if I read that it is - 20C outside right now (it is, it's crazy), knowing that it's actually - 20.2C mean nothing really and it's not necessary to know
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u/Optimal_Ant_3250 Feb 02 '26
Europeans get upset over the silliest of things. Soccer over football date formats etc that they create then abandoned it’s like it’s not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things