Anyone familiar with the Reaumur temperature scale?

[ABrandNewWorld]

Originally Posted by Beercoholism

Why are you people trying to fix what's not broken? The celcius scale is perfect. Defines the freezing and boiling point of water with even metric numbers which have real easy to understand application for the average layperson.

Fahrenheit fits the better base ten system with the 0-100 being temperature range experienced in continental climates. Celsius has too many subzero numbers but I can see how it works in warmer climates that rarely, if ever, go below freezing. I wouldn't mind using Celsius in Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, or Southern Italy but wouldn't want to use it in places that have frequent subfreezing temperatures as too many negative numbers are annoying. I do see the logic for other uses of the metric system measuring height and weight in multiples of 10 though.

[jtab4994]

Originally Posted by Steelernation71

Anyway, I have never heard of the reamuer scale until now. Doesn't seem very logical for an 80 degree boiling point.

Thanks for the replies, everyone!


BTW Dr. Reaumur chose 80 as the boiling point of the specific dilution of alcohol he used his original thermometer. Others started manufacturing thermometers using other liquids and they settled on 80 as the boiling point of water, since different manufacturers used different liquids (including mercury) and none of them had the same boiling point. It's not clear what the boiling point of water was, using Reaumur's original diluted alcohol.

[Ethereal]

So the freezing point is at 0C and boiling at 80C? This is makes it a rather lazy, sketchy version of the Celsius scale. Not impressed.

[Urania93]

Originally Posted by EverBlack

I think having a negative temperature isn't logical.

It would be like as if 2 meters were 0, and 1.50 were -0.5, so you can be -0.5 (unit) tall, so... you could be a negative number tall! That doesn't make sense, I think the most logical scale is the Kelvin scale.

I totally agree with this, from the physical point of view it doesn't make sense to use negative temperatures. The zero in the most of temperature scales is completely arbitrary, it doesn't represent at all the physical phenomenon behind temperature. It is not like the measure of electric charge for example, in which a negative and positive charges and particles without any charge have different behaviors and properties.

The temperature is the macroscopic manifestation of the motion of particles within a certain portion of matter, lower is their motion lower is the temperature. The temperature corresponding to the minimum of the kinetic energy of the particles is known as absolute zero, and this is the real zero of the temperature scales (this is a really simplified and short explanation). So, when talking about physics and logic understanding of the phenomenon behind temperature, K wins over every other scale.

I agree on the example you made with lengths too, from a physical point of view it doesn't seems too different from the commonly used temperature scales. The difference is just that we are used to use a scale with an arbitrary zero for temperature, and not for measuring distances.

[jtab4994]

Originally Posted by Ethereal

So the freezing point is at 0C and boiling at 80C? This is makes it a rather lazy, sketchy version of the Celsius scale. Not impressed.

LOL I wonder if this will impress you: Anders Celsius originally proposed that 0 be the boiling point and 100 the freezing point of water. Mind you, all this was about 12 years after Dr. Reaumur devised his diluted-alcohol system. It wasn't until after Dr. Celsius' death that his scale was reversed into what we know today.