tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Feb 18 09:18:21 2006

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RE: bIrqu'choH

DloraH ([email protected]) [KLI Member] [Hol po'wI']

'ach nuq 'oS pagh Fahrenheit?
chay' Fahrenheit cherlu'?

DloraH


> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] 
> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Terrence Donnelly
> Sent: Saturday, 18 February, 2006 10:59
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: bIrqu'choH
> 
> 
> 
> --- [email protected] wrote:
> > > 
> > 
> > If the boiling point equals 100%, then what is it
> > 100% of?  I would expect it 
> > to be 100% of the total heat content, which would
> > then be about 373 kelvins 
> > and each percentage of that would be 3.73 kelvins
> > and 0% would be absolute zero.
> > 
> 
> But that's not how they did it.  As it was explained
> to me, the deviser of the Celsius/centigrade scale 
> picked two universal physical markers, the boiling 
> point and the freezing point of water, and arbitrarily
> 
> labelled the latter 0 and the former 100, then it 
> was a simple matter to mark each degree between 
> these, since it was a simple percentage of 100.  There
> 
> is no such natural marker for temperatures below 
> freezing (except, as you note, absolute zero), so they
> 
> just extended the same system in the opposite
> direction.
> 
> So (just as an example) if a column of mercury is
> 150 mm high at the freezing point, and is 250 mm high
> at the boiling point, then each degree above freezing
> is represented by a 1 mm change in the column;
> therefore, degrees below 0 also change the height of
> the
> column by 1 mm in the opposite direction.  So a
> column of mercury 50 mm high would correspond to a
> Celsius temperature of -100 (or, in my "Klingon"
> scale, lacking 100% of the freezing point), but
> -100 C doesn't correspond to any particular physical
> state, at least none involving water.  The degrees
> below 0 are simply measured by analogy with their
> positive counterparts.
> 
> (BTW, I don't really like the centigrade scale, in
> part because it falls into negative values too 
> readily.  You can read my rant against it at
> http://other.tdonnelly.org/fahren.html , if you
> are interested. But it does make it easy to
> describe temperature in terms of percents!)
> 
> -- ter'eS
> 
> 
>

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