Eli5: I’m trying to find the best way to word this but how does one measure “negative degrees”, like in temperature, like how do you quantify the absence of something that isn’t tangible?

Question

Eli5: I’m trying to find the best way to word this but how does one measure “negative degrees”, like in temperature, like how do you quantify the absence of something that isn’t tangible?

In: Chemistry

Answer 1

You set an arbitrary point to be 0, basically. In celsius, this point is the freezing temperature of water. Obviously things can get colder than that, so you get negatives.