• Funkytom467@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    For distance and mass, zero means no distance and no mass.

    For temperature though having none means no kinetic energy of atoms/molecules. It’s absolute zero, the zero Kelvin. So the other units are the weird ones.

    But since zero Kelvin isn’t a phenomenon you’ll ever encounter in nature, it makes Kelvin a pretty unappealing scale for everyday life.

    And thus we started making shit up…

    • Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      When most of the temperature scales were made, they didn’t even know yet that there was a zero, I mean, theoretically, they likely knew or assumed. But they had no way of practically measuring it yet, at the very least.

      I do think that as much as it would be weird for a couple of years, it would help a lot in the long run to widely adopt a temperature scale that starts at 0.

      Because honestly, the percentage of adults I come across that have no idea how temperature works or what it even is conceptually beyond just “a nice day or a bad day” or “this is the number for cooking this thing” is astonishing.

      • Fermion@feddit.nl
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        2 months ago

        Because honestly, the percentage of adults I come across that have no idea how temperature works

        Just don’t ask us to define entropy.