this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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Nope, Kelvins are a countable unit, like meters. Celsius and Fahrenheit are not.
Is the difference that they can go negative or...? I never quite understood what makes them "degrees"
No, the difference is that if you double a kelvin number, you have quantifiably doubled the heat. If you double a Celsius or Fahrenheit number, you have not quantifiably doubled the heat… the number does not objectively count an amount of something.
Think meters. A meter measures an exact length. Two meters is double one meter.
Celsius doesn’t do that. Celsius is a scale between two amounts of heat.
The equivalent for distance would be if we had a scale where 0 degrees distance was equal to 582.7762 meters, and 100 degrees distance was equal to 721.5323 meters. Each degree between 0 and a hundred is then a slice of that range. Maybe for the people who designed such a scale there’s useful reasons to do so, but you aren’t measuring the quantity or amount of something, you’re measuring a range.
Kelvin measures molecular movement, just as hertz measures oscillations or cycles, or grams measure weight.