eli5: Why is it temperatures can go up to the trillions but only down to -273?
In: Physics
If the question is asking why there isn’t an even number of degrees between the lowest negative degree and the highest positive degree, I think the answer is humans.
First of all, the measurement of “degrees” is made by humans. So, the measurements are relative to humans. We “randomly” decided what degrees would measure, (frozen and boiling water), put 100 degrees between those two points (for Celsius anyway) and used that to compare to everything else.
Absolute zero happens to be closer to the range of degrees humans live in (the one measured by frozen and boiling water) so we can only go to -273. If we had a highest possible temperature (which I don’t know if we do… that’s a question for someone else), it would be entirely possible to make a measurement scale that had an even number of positive and negative degrees between absolute zero and the highest temperature. The only problem is the range of numbers would be completely different from the ones we customarily use. We would be in the negatives all the time I imagine.
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