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When I use degrees, I measure them in: | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 95 comments | Search Discussion
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  • (Score: 1) by jabirali on Thursday March 20 2014, @12:35AM

    by jabirali (2988) on Thursday March 20 2014, @12:35AM (#18739)

    For everyday purposes, I usually stick to degrees Celsius; partly because it's easy to relate to (water freezes at 0 °C and boils at 100 °C), and partly because it's what I'm used to. But fundamentally, temperature is just an energy measure: e.g. for a simple ideal gas, it's just the average kinetic energy of the particles. You can see that by noting that temperature only ever occurs in physical formulae in the form of a product kT, where k is Boltzmanns constant, which has dimensions of energy. Therefore, when I'm doing science, I prefer just measuring temperature in energy units instead, which basically get's rid of Boltzmanns constant in all physical formulae (it's equivalent to defining k=1).