Real metric supremacists be washing their hands with napalm after that handshake
I'm assuming this is because the concept of absolute zero did not exist when most of these temperature scales were defined, whereas zero distance and zero weight were easily observable
zero weight were easily observable
how?
How much water, by weight, is in an empty cup? Round to the nearest amount an average 17th century merchant could identify.
I guess in terms of an actual weightless object... Not... But if you have 2 equal weight items, call their combined weight 1 weight unit, take one away, that's half a weight unit, take two away, that's zero weight units.
Rankine is there twice.
And it shouldn't have degrees like Kelvin, right?
The Rankine scale is generally measured in degrees. That's because it's defined in terms of the Fahrenheit scale, which is also measured in degrees. i.e. 1 Rankine degree = 1 Fahrenheit degree.
This is not the case for the Kelvin scale, which is defined directly in terms of thermal energy: 1 Kelvin ≈ 1.38*10^-23 J. Coincidentally (but not really of course) this amount of thermal energy is such that an increase of 1 Kelvin corresponds to 1 degree Celsius.
This is rather pedantic, as you could easily define Rankine in terms of thermal energy as well. Some people do this and don't say "degrees" in front of Rankine. Or, you could define the Kelvin in terms of the Celsius, and measure it in degrees.
tl:dr Rankine has degrees, but for mainly historical reasons.
P.S.: Kelvin actually also had degrees until 1968!
Not if it's an absolute scale, no. And then it does actually agree on what 0 is with Kelvin too.
Someone probably incorrectly wrote Réaumur degrees. (Copy of Celsius but ×0.8 for some reason; somehow stays kinda relevant in 1770-1920 Europe)
And had the same zero as Kelvin.
Remember kids, if it’s not metric it has nothing to do with science!
USGS uses imperial for a ton of publications. As a geographer, I had to get pretty comfortable with both standards.
Kelvin and Celsius are best buddies.
Fun fact;
Fahrenheit and Celsius line up at -40
Fahrenheit and Kelvin line up at 575
Those numbers are not particularly useful, but they are fun to know.
I was about to make the same comment. I got bored in math class with a graphing calculator and figured it out lol.
I knew about the Fahrenheit and Celsius one as a kid (because the local weatherman pointed it out one winter) but I only looked up the Kelvin one a few years back.
I like that °C and K don't point at eachother.
Isn’t Rankine the Kelvin of Fahrenheit
Yes. And 0 people use it.
It was invented by some scottish guy long before we had the means to measure things that would need it, and ever since that multibillion-dollar satellite thing fell to pieces even American scientists use metric units, we learn them in every grade level’s science class and our scientific community has this understandable atmosphere of regret that Congress was too lazy to completely kill off imperial units when they had the chance
I've always been curious why 32 was chosen for the freezing point of water in Fahrenheit. or was there something else and did that just land at 32?
it's kind of a mystery and i love it
Fahrenheit is actually a base-ten system, where 0° was the freezing temperature of a salt/water mixture used in laboratories in the 18th century, and 100° was supposed to be a human's blood temperature. Another convenient perk of the fahrenheit system is that most European weather occurs inside it's 0-100 range.
Eventually Fahrenheit saw the scientific need to know the freezing and boiling point of plain water, but instead of adjusting his system, he just found those values within his system.
The story I heard, and I don’t know if this is true or not, is that 100 isn’t just a human’s blood temperature, but specifically Mrs. Fahrenheit’s blood temperature.
