My mind works in strange ways sometimes. Read and think about each of the following statements:
- I was cooking a pizza in the oven at 250 degrees, but I was in a big hurry, so I doubled the temperature to 500 degrees.
- I miss the summer days when it was 80 degrees, and, over night, the temperature would be halved to 40 degrees.
- It was ten degrees the other morning, and tripled to thirty by noon.
- It was 0.1 the morning before that, and had risen three-hundred times to 30 degrees by noon.
- It was -1 before I woke up that morning, so it was -30 times as warm by noon.
To me, it makes progressively less and less sense. But I’m trying to think of why. It’s clearly asymptotic at 0 degrees: if it’s exactly 0 degrees and grows to 0.1 degrees, it’s “infinitely warmer.” Of course, most people wouldn’t notice the tenth of a degree increase, and my concept of “infinitely warmer” is something significantly warmer than 0.1. And it doesn’t make any sense when you go into negatives. I think another part of the problem is that “zero” degrees doesn’t mean “zero warmth,” since it doesn’t make sense to have a negative amount of warmth. (Assuming that “no warmth” isn’t neutral, but is absolute zero.) Of course, Fahrenheit and Celsius don’t even grow at the same rate, compounding things further.
The experts have commented: you need to use Kelvin if you’re going to do “doubling.”
It was 255.427778 degrees kelvin when I woke up. By afternoon, it was 272.038889 degrees kelvin. Rather than 300 times as warm, it was about 6% warmer.
Of course, this ruins any talk of doubling temperatures. To “double” the warmth when it’s 0 (Fahrenheit), you’d have to wait until it was 459 degrees outside.
Its all about the units of measure isn’t it? 🙂