GsTSaien t1_j6mn5sh wrote on January 31, 2023 at 12:24 PM

Reply to comment by Crux_AMVS24 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

I gues you could do something like a scale in which the number represents how far you are from boiling water, in which 0 would be boiling and anything hotter would go into negatives.

However, this is not as intuitive; 0 kelvin being absolute cold makes more sense.

Crux_AMVS24 OP t1_j6mv1ew wrote on January 31, 2023 at 1:36 PM

I don’t mean reverse the negatives, I mean invert the temperatures. That way, absolute zero becomes 1/0(infinity), which makes sense cuz it’s physically impossible to reach

MrTsquared88 t1_j6onyhj wrote on January 31, 2023 at 8:33 PM

Everyone is downvoting you, but I’m actually not entirely convinced that your new system is impossible. Inconvenient? Definitely. But impossible? I’m not sure.

If absolute zero is infinity, then tell me the new freezing and boiling points of water based on your new scale. And then tell me how the formula

PV = nrT

still works. If you can do that, I’ll agree that temperature could measure the amount of “cold” in a substance rather than the amount of “hot”.