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wildadragon t1_j6m9k9v wrote

Reply to comment by AxialGem in The direction of temperature is arbitrary. There is no reason for hot objects to be assigned a larger number than cold ones by Crux_AMVS24

It's counterintuitive. If you saw 2 people running and one was faster than the other would you put them lower than the slower person?

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AxialGem t1_j6ma1ji wrote

It might be counterintuitive. Or that feeling might just be because we are used to our current system, idk. If I conceptualise my measurement as 'How still is this person?' I might put them lower, yea.

Of course, unintuitive scales do exist. For example, when astronomers measure how bright a star appears from Earth, brighter stars get a lower number, and dimmer stars get a higher number.

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Crux_AMVS24 OP t1_j6mhhk8 wrote

That’s a good argument, however my point was a bit different. Temperature, by its very definition, had nothing to do with heat, or internal energy. It’s a parameter used to describe the distribution of kinetic energy across all the particles(called Maxwell’s velocity distribution curve). That curve, is of the sort e^-(1/kT) where k is a constant and T is the temperature. In that sense, we’re using temperature the wrong way. If we defined absolute zero as infinity and very high temperatures as tending to zero, we’d have a scale more in tune with this actual physical behaviour of molecules. And if THAT definition of temperature, it is INVERSELY proportional to the kinetic energy of the molecules. That’s the thing, temperature isn’t a measure of heat, it just so happens to be numerical proportional to it. Is weight a measure of inertia? No, weight is a force. However, the weight of a object does have some sort of relation with the mass of that object, which IS a measure of inertia. It’s the same thing with heat and temperature

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AxialGem t1_j6mi2s9 wrote

huh well today I learned. I'm far away from being that knowledgable about physics, but that's pretty interesting. Of course, that's not super intuitive to the average lay person either... But sure, thanks for the explanation lol

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Crux_AMVS24 OP t1_j6mjfve wrote

Yeah, I tried not getting too technical with it in terms of my explanations, but at some point you gotta whip em out. Also, about the intuition. Wouldn’t there be any of that for temperature? If stick my hand in hot water and the other hand in ice, there isn’t anything that strikes me saying that the hot water should have a higher number attached to it. For something like distance, it’s obviously, bigger distance = higher number, but when it comes to temperature, we could have gone either way and nothing would’ve changed except some formulae

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