eli5!Why do we have different temperature measurement?
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Almost anything can be measured in different ways. Length, time, weight, or in this case temperature. Horses are measured in hands, the pyramids were built in cubits, pounds, kilograms, on and on.
For temperature, unlike most other scales, it’s also arbitrary where we put the zero, which is why it’s so unique. Zero centimeters is obviously no length. Zero kilograms is no weight, but what is “no temperature?”
Celsius uses the freezing and boiling points of water, puts zero at freezing, and splits that range into 100 “degrees.” Fahrenheit, on the other hand, puts zero at the freezing point of a brine solution, 32 at the freezing point of water, and 180 “degrees” later the boiling point of water (212). And don’t even get me started on Kelvin.
Final result: several massively different measurement systems for a thing that’s actually very hard to quantify. Temperature is unique in that respect.
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