• ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        It’s just designed with a slightly different set of assumptions.

        Instead of water freezing and boiling 100° apart, it’s 180° in fahrenheit. That makes it so that they’re on the opposite sides of a temperature gauge, and a degree of rotation of the gauge matches a degree of temperature.
        Instead of zero being the freezing point of water under specific conditions, it’s a brine solution whose temperature will stabilize in a way that’s useful for using as a calibration point.

        Stripped of its context, it’s odd. But it’s not irrational, just no longer consensus as the standard, and as such deprecated.

      • chaogomu@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Never. They use the same spacing between degrees. The Kelvin scale was derived from the Celsius scale, just placing the 0° at absolute zero rather than at the freezing point of water.