Because it wasn’t science. :) keep in mind it was before there was a notion that a temperature scale was part of science, it was part of a tool.
“My thermometer is easier to read and the scale is more likely to line up with what you want to measure”.
It’s kinda like how a CD having 700mb of storage is a product of engineering choices and compatibility with older tape/record formats that usually had less than 80 minutes of audio, and not some fundamental measurement about the world.
The science he did was in making methods of consistently measuring temperature, not the numbers he assigned to those temperatures.
CDs have ~700 mb storage because that’s how many bytes it took to store 74 minutes, which was how long a CD needed to be to store Wilhelm Furtwängler’s 1951 recording of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. That was the longest copy of the Symphony they could find and so that’s what set the standard.
How is changing a number fudging the science? Dude just liked powers of 2 so he set arbitrary things to be slightly different numbers. Heck, even Celsius is pretty arbitrary. The triple point of Hydrogen Hydroxide isn’t actually some magical mystical temperature that’s more important than all other temperatures, and the boiling point of one particular chemical at our best estimate of the average atmospheric pressure on the surface of this one particular rock is almost completely meaningless.
So he fudged the science so the product would be easier/cheaper to make? Why does this feel like such a common story?
Because it wasn’t science. :) keep in mind it was before there was a notion that a temperature scale was part of science, it was part of a tool.
“My thermometer is easier to read and the scale is more likely to line up with what you want to measure”.
It’s kinda like how a CD having 700mb of storage is a product of engineering choices and compatibility with older tape/record formats that usually had less than 80 minutes of audio, and not some fundamental measurement about the world.
The science he did was in making methods of consistently measuring temperature, not the numbers he assigned to those temperatures.
CDs have ~700 mb storage because that’s how many bytes it took to store 74 minutes, which was how long a CD needed to be to store Wilhelm Furtwängler’s 1951 recording of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. That was the longest copy of the Symphony they could find and so that’s what set the standard.
How is changing a number fudging the science? Dude just liked powers of 2 so he set arbitrary things to be slightly different numbers. Heck, even Celsius is pretty arbitrary. The triple point of Hydrogen Hydroxide isn’t actually some magical mystical temperature that’s more important than all other temperatures, and the boiling point of one particular chemical at our best estimate of the average atmospheric pressure on the surface of this one particular rock is almost completely meaningless.
https://youtu.be/7qxTKtlvaVE?si=2sTunmM5aAeKzxK8
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/7qxTKtlvaVE?si=2sTunmM5aAeKzxK8
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.