eli5: Why is it temperatures can go up to the trillions but only down to -273?
In: Physics
People have given you the physics answer, but it’s worth acknowledging the linguistic one as well.
Most of our uses for temperature relate to either freezing or boiling of water. Cooking is the obvious one, but it’s also very important for our understanding of weather, and to some degree even practising medicine.
This is to say the average person benefits from understanding generally what temperature boiling and freezing are, so we decided to make freezing zero and boiling one hundred. This makes it easy for people to remember.
Ultimately though on the grand scheme of physics freezing of water is pretty far towards the cold end of the spectrum. So when you use these measurements for physics it can feel like we set some sort of arbitrary limit on how cold things can get.
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