Why do we use Kelvin as an si unit to calculate temperature?
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Celsius is based off water, under regular conditions. At 0 it freezes and 100 it boils. Simple stuff, easy, useful in everyday life.
But scientists deal with all sorts of scenarios that are not boiling a tea kettle to make afternoon tea, or putting an ice cube into a cup of whiskey.
They think about things small and huge, unimaginably small or huge, at different altitudes (where the boling point of water is lower than 100). they think about weird scenarios like tons of air pressure, or no air pressure, or what happens if we’re on Mars instead of Earth!
0 and 100 in Celsius make sense for us, but they stop making sense when you start thinking about everything that is not riding your bike down the street on a breezy summer afternoon with no cares in the world.
So we have Kelvin. Instead of starting at some arbitrary point, of water freezing at 0 in your home under day to day conditions of you riding your bike, they start at what the universe declares is actual 0, we call that absolute zero. And Kelvin starts there. But celsius isn’t all bad… so we kept it mostly in tact, we just moved 0 down a whole lot.
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