98.6 is EXACTLY equal to 37. The accuracy of 37 is what is in issue, but when we accept that 37 is the statistical average, then it is equally accurate to say the 98.6 is the same statistical average. It would be highly improper to assert that 99 was the same statistical average, because it would NOT be.
Now, if the measurements upon which the assertion was based had been done with the Farenheit scale, we might well assert something like 98 or 99 as the “average human body temperature taken orally.” But it wasn’t. So get over it.
Here’s the problem: 98.6 may be accurate, but it’s not precise. Or at least, it’s not as precise as the number of digits implies. If I say that a particular temperature is 98.6 degrees, then I mean that it’s somewhere between 98.55 and 98.65. If, on the other hand, I say that a particular temperature is 37 degrees, then I mean that it’s somewhere between 36.5 and 37.5.
The mistake here is similar to that of the museum janitor, who says that a particular fossil is 65,000,003 years old, because he heard it was 65 million years old when he started working there, and he’s been there for three years now.
This is the story I have heard for most of my 63 years.
I think I first found it in one of Asimov’s non-fiction books on physics when I was a young man, in my twenties, I think.
I was surprised that Cicil didn’t seem to know that one; he is usually quite accurate. Oh well, nobody is perfect; but he comes closer than most.
To my surprise, Asimov honestly did say this. It’s in his essay, The Height of Up," from Oct. 1959 F&SF and reprinted in View from A Height and Asimov on Physics.
I don’t even have to type it all out, because David Simmons did it in this 2004 thread:
Well, that should take Asimov’s reputation down a peg.
Fahrenheit was looking for a scale for his thermometer for meteorological purposes. The 180, while being a convenient number in and of itself, also allowed for fine measurements for the outside temperature. He (supposedly) added 32 to avoid (most) negative numbers as lay people didn’t understand them readily.
Yes. Fahrenheit is very useful for the temperature range found in most of the temperate zone. I recall he did make adjustments to get the 180, and other points. For instance his original 100F was human body temperature. But that left a fractional number for the boiling and freezing points. It was easier to set those as integers and leave body temperature fractional (and body temperature isn’t as consistent as boiling and freezing anyway).
That’s not the issue here. Of course he relied on secondary sources, but he should damn well have understood the point made by RedSwinglineOne, that the divisibility of 180 is meaningless when applied to temperature on a non-absolute zero scale. What probably happened is that he was thinking about five other essays he was working on that did make a point about the divisibility of 180 and why 360 was a favorite number of the ancients and just automatically copied it into a place where it was more than irrelevant.
As has already been pointed out, multiplication and division comes into the issue of making thermometers. (Don’t try to catch me on absolute zero; I caught my 7th-grade science teacher on that one over half a century ago.)
Seems like a “just so” story in the absence of any cites, especially due to the variability of human body temperature. If markings for each temperature were tied to the measure of body heat, then thermometer readings would vary quite widely. Unless there were some form of measurement concordance, where they marked where some other thermometer gave a reading of 96 degrees as 96 degrees on each new one.
That doesn’t really apply to 180. You’d think 256 would be far more useful in that context. Or 128 for body temperature. And it’s not what Fahrenheit or anybody did.
Fahrenheit designed a horse and ended up with a camel. He made adjustments to a concept to end up with something that had integer representations for the freezing and boiling points of water, under typical conditions. A lot of other niceties came along with the scale like the typical range of temperatures in a lot of the world on a scale of 0 to 100, numbers like 180 that some find handy, typical body temperature near 100. Fahrenheit may or may not have considered any of these factors, but historians should be accurate in reporting the known methodology for arriving at the scale though. But without these docudrama revisions of history Cecil wouldn’t have many column topics.
The Celsius scale has its shorcomings, not the least of which suggest that Anders Celsius was a few degrees short of body-normal temperature: He made the boiling point of water 0 and the freezing point 100. Also, Wikipedia:
Question: Could Asimov’s reputation be saved if the 180° business, along with its many evenly divided numbers, mean that through their use in developing the scale Fahrenheit avoided Celsius’s absolute-temperature failure?
BTW, The Wiki article needs an editor who could ask the author questions directly. It suffers from some strange syntax here and there, as if English is not the author’s first language. If so, that may have introduced errors inadvertantly.
No; the only absolute temperature scale (that is, one in which a doubling of the temperature value represents a doubling in heat energy) in wide use is Kelvin, though it is at least a centigrade scale like Celsius is.
Powers &8^]
For clarity, it took me a moment to realize the relevant text is on the tab labeled “Sources”. For some reason when I go to a link, I expect to be taken to the correct tab.
This entirely misses the point. “37” is the average to the ones place, but that says nothing about what numbers were actually used. Suppose Celsius took measurements ranging from 35.7 to 39.0 deg for human body, and then calculated an statistical average of 37.2 deg. However, he noted that the range was so broad that worrying about that 0.2 was rather pointless, so he conveniently dropped it and said “average human temp = 37”.
If you take his actual calculated value to the same decimal precision as we use in Fahrenheit, then you have to start with the 37.2 deg.
(37.2 *9 / 5) + 32 = 98.96, which rounds for 3 decimal places to 99.0 deg F.
“37” could be any value from 36.5 to 37.4 and round to 37 when looking at 2 significant digits (or even degrees of Celsius). We have no information on the precision of Celsius’s data for determining 37, so we cannot say if his numerical average was 37.000, or if it was 37.2 and he just decided 37 was more convenient.
Centigrade meaning "the temperatures between water freezing and boiling points is divided into 100 equal increments). Yes, Kelvin scale uses Celsius degree divisions but moves the zero point to absolute zero.
The Fahrenheit equivalent is the Rankine scale - it uses Fahrenheit degrees but puts zero at absolute zero. In practice it probably isn’t very widely used, other than for college student homework assignments.
