Fahrenheit is rubbish

There are many reasons why the Fahrenheit scale is rubbish, here are just a few of them. Obviously it isn't used so much these days, except by old people and Americans who just can't let go. The bilingual weather forecasts we have to endure are very irritating, but not actually a property of the silly temperature scale. I learnt the some following facts in GCSE science class, therefore they are probably not true.

The Fahrenheit scale was defined ages and obviously made more sense at the time, and was (not unsurprisingly) defined so that 0 and 100 were important temperatures. They decided that 0F should be "the coldest temperature possible" which sounds like a good idea. But they didn't know so much about physics as we do now, and now we think of 0F as the coldest temperature people could make in a science lab 200 years ago. Which is even more stupid when you consider that you don't have to explore the arctic very hard before you find temperatures below 0F. On the other hand, have you ever noticed that a healthy persons temperature is nearly 100F? Mr Heppenstall (chemistry teacher) explained that 100F is the temperature of a healthy cows mouth.

Now, obviously, the scale is defined in terms of the modern temperature scales and seems like a bit of an historical oddity. Chemical properties of water are fine, but with Celcius you end up with absolute zero being some silly irrational number. Or you could go with Kelvin, but then the freezing point of water is some silly irrational number. So why not come up with a new scale where the freezing point of water, the boiling point of water and absolute zero are all sensible values? Here's how you do it...

First you need a name for your new temperature unit, let's call it an "Onkion". You say that 0C is 0Onk, then you start taking logarithms so that absolute zero is negative infinity. You still have the freedom to scale your new scale so that 100C = 100Onk, then you are done. Here is a simple formula for converting from Celcius to Onkions. I have used T_C to represent the temperature in Celcius, and T_C0 to represent absolute zero measured in Celsius.

 Here is a simpler, but imprecise version of the formula with numbers and things in it.

Here is a table of some interesting temperatures with both Celcius and Onkions in it. It seems that this mental new temperature scale that I just made up it quite good. Instead of worrying about lots of decimal places of temperatures that are very close to absolute zero, they are all nicely spread out. And for very hot temperatures you don't really need to worry about using scientific notation for very large numbers, as the numbers don't really get that large.

Description	Temperature in Celcius	Temperature in Onkions
Absolute zero	-273.15	Negative Infinity
Superfliud liquid helium	-271	-1560
Boiling point of oxygen	-223	-541
Boiling point of nitrogen	-196	-405
Warm day on Saturn	-139	-228
Freezing point of water	0	0
Warm day in England	20	23
Healthy person	37	41
Boiling point of water	100	100
Medium oven	180	162
Warn day on Venus	460	316
Melting point of iron	1538	606
Surface of the sun	5500	978
Centreof the sun	15,700,000	3500

In other news, please enjoy this picture from my garden.

My red hot poker is poking very well this year. It's actually a metre tall.