this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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As someone who grew up with Fahrenheit, it's an arbitrary scale. 0 is the "coldest thing" that he could create in a lab at the time, basically a bath of ice and salt water, 100-ish was supposed to be the temperature of a healthy human body. They are unrelated things. It has nothing to do with "what we feel", people only think that because they grew up with it. The same can be said for all imperial measurements because there is no other way to say that 12 inches to a foot and 3 feet to a yard is "intuitive".
Celsius putting freezing at 0 and boiling at 100 (at sea level) are related to each other because it's measuring the temperature of water the entire time and then setting that as a the literal metric we use to measure other things.
I switched to Celsius for a couple of years and after going through a couple of seasons or two I had an intuitive feeling for what a value would feel like. It made perfect sense. I only stopped using it because my phone switched back one day for some reason and I was tired of having to convert to freedom units to avoid getting odd reactions from people.