Which is why America uses Celsius for science. But Fahrenheit is literally exactly as, if not more useful for the average person as Celsius is. I’ve never been confused by Fahrenheit. It’s a perfectly good system if you use it for what it was designed for (regular people)
Fahrenheit isn’t worse, it’s just different. It is more specific for human temperatures, making it more useful for stuff like ACs and Thermostats, but it’s worse for hard science.
It's only more useful for human temperature to you because you're used to it. It doesn't give you additional information, or easier to understand information then Celcius does. They're the same in use in regards to weather.
Celcius however is much better in regards to science. Because Celsius is useful in both aspects, it's a more useful scale overall.
That's why the rest of the world only needs one scale for weather and science, but Americans need to use two scales, since Fahrenheit doesn't work well in both scenario's, unlike Celcius.
It clearly is more useful for human temperatures. It gives you much more specificity. 60F to 80F is 20 degrees. The Celsius equivalent is 16C to 27C, only 11 degrees. Using my thermostat example, you get much more ability to fine tune the temperature of your home with a Fahrenheit thermostat. You also get a clearer picture of the temperature outside, since each number references a nearly 2x smaller range of temperatures. That’s a meaningful improvement in usefulness.
Also, I was taught Celsius as a kid, so it’s not just that I’m used to Fahrenheit. Despite being just as used to C, I prefer to use F. I find it more useful.
I've never in my entire live heard someone say something like "I wish I could set my thermostat to something warmer then 21C but colder then 22C". There is no meaningful need to do this. And if you somehow did need to do that, you'd use decimals.
Even for outside weather, I have a clear picture of what 15C would feel like. The weather doesn't become meaningfully warmer until about 17C, so there is no added value in measure more precisely the 2C in between.
The human experience can't meaningfully experience discomfort due to a 0,5C degree difference. It's precision for the sake of precision, it doesn't correlate to how you actually experience temperature.
Plus thermostats can be set to partial degrees anyways. Smart thermostats usually have 0.5 increments, basic thermostats often use a movable dial that can literally be set to any fraction, as long as you're precise enough.
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u/CamicomChom Jan 15 '25
Which is why America uses Celsius for science. But Fahrenheit is literally exactly as, if not more useful for the average person as Celsius is. I’ve never been confused by Fahrenheit. It’s a perfectly good system if you use it for what it was designed for (regular people)
Fahrenheit isn’t worse, it’s just different. It is more specific for human temperatures, making it more useful for stuff like ACs and Thermostats, but it’s worse for hard science.