Why does the Fahrenheit scale use 32 degrees as a freezing point?
Asked by: Maria Ciaramitaro
Answer
Daniel Fahrenheit did not use the freezing point of water as a basis for developing his
scale. He called the temperature of an ice/salt/water mixture 'zero degrees', as this
was the lowest temperature he could conveniently attain in his lab. He called his own
body temperature '96 degrees', and then divided the scale into single degrees between 0
and 96. On this scale, the freezing point of pure water happens to occur at 32 (and the
boiling point at 212). The Celsius scale has more convenient values for these phase
transition points (0 and 100 degrees) because Anders Celsius DID use water as a basis
for his scale.
Answered by: Jonathan Heath
'The strength and weakness of physicists is that we believe in what we can measure. And if we can't measure it, then we say it probably doesn't exist. And that closes us off to an enormous amount of phenomena that we may not be able to measure because they only happened once. For example, the Big Bang. ... That's one reason why they scoffed at higher dimensions for so many years. Now we realize that there's no alternative... '