hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1432.txt

Episode: 1432
Title: HPR1432: Fahrenheit 212
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1432/hpr1432.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 02:14:41

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Well, if you wanna see additional predictions next.
Yep.
I gotta wait.
Hijim.
Hello everyone, my name is Joel, and before we get into this episode, I'd like to take
a moment and remind you just how easy it is to contribute to Hack and Public Radio.
And to remind you that all the episodes you hear are user-contributed, meaning that people
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The following is an audio clip from a very recent HPR episode wherein some confusion around
Fahrenheit in Celsius was brought up as well as a request by Ken to have someone record
an HPR episode on Fahrenheit.
Let's listen to that.
Well, there's some great end Fahrenheit, and we normally use Fahrenheit here in the U.S.
And right now, where I'm at, it's 10 degrees, but the low temperature for today is going
to be negative 2.
10 degrees F. 10 degrees Fahrenheit?
10 degrees Fahrenheit.
Oh, according to my little weather station here, 46 degrees Fahrenheit with cloud cover.
This 12 is 10 degrees for those of us who are using a proper temperature system, 40
vatis.
Now, I get two different readings, my little weather app on my screen is telling me nine
Fahrenheit.
I don't know what that is in Celsius.
How can Fahrenheit be from 10 degrees being minus 12 Celsius, 45 degrees being seven degrees
Celsius?
Because that's because Jando is way down south in Texas.
No, I mean, the temperature scale Fahrenheit is on a Fahrenheit scale.
Freezing point of water is 32, which would be zero on Celsius.
Yeah, the scales are not linear, yeah, next to each other.
Yeah, it's some really weird ratio.
It's not a straightforward ratio at all.
No, it's like Celsius is like, it goes up in increments.
Surely.
Why Fahrenheit, can somebody please do a show on Fahrenheit and explain to me the logic
behind it?
All right, very good.
So hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
My name is Joel.
I'm here to do a short episode on Fahrenheit and Celsius, and with me here is Ken Fallon.
Hello, Ken.
Hi, Joel.
You're a different Joel to the TLL TS Joel, I guess.
Oh, yes.
My bad.
I am in no way affiliated with him.
I'm completely different Joel from Pennsylvania, so I'll call myself not Joel.
There we go.
Not Joel.
Yeah, but then we get confused with not to being actually tattooed.
Well, anyways, I was listening to your guys.
You guys had a conversation on the marathon, and there was a lot of confusion over Celsius
and Fahrenheit, and we were like, is this a weird ratio?
Is it a weird logic between the two?
And believe it or not, Celsius and Fahrenheit are based on the same logics and almost the
same identical math, which a lot of people won't realize, and I guess before I cover that,
I should get into some quick terminology.
Obviously, everyone knows what Celsius and Fahrenheit are.
There's also Centigrade, which is an old fashioned term for Celsius.
Am I not mistaken?
Centigrade?
No, I think you're not.
Centigrade and Celsius.
Centigrade and Celsius, yeah.
I mean, the US of A, I have actually used Celsius for a few years now, and I'm pretty
comfortable with both of them.
I have some good, mental idea of where things subjectively are, according to my senses,
and personally, I've come to prefer Celsius because there's less numbers in it as I'll
get around to discussing.
And to me, that makes more sense.
Of course.
Completely contrary to the arguments that are a very good friend was making.
Right.
And to me, you know, it's obviously subjective to where I live, but when it goes below zero
degrees Celsius, it is really, really cold, and I could probably die outside too long.
If it's 30 degrees, it's going to be way hotter than my blood is, and I will die.
And in the US, people have become accustomed to seeing it from this way of, oh, it's in
the 20s.
It's in the 30s.
It's in the 40s.
It's in the 50s.
It's in the 70s.
It's in the 80s.
90s.
And to me, that's more numbers.
I have to try to remember.
Okay.
That's just the American way of thinking, of course.
But then is the point not that if you go from 20s to 30s, there is a larger difference
there.
Whereas if you go on the scale, on the Celsius, you really need to talk about one degree
or two degrees colder or warmer.
Yeah.
I'll get into that in a second, but I was just trying to set it up there where in America,
it's this confusing game of knowing your numbers.
So I'll cover that into like that sort of stuff, as it was good.
Yeah.
And people in America are deathly afraid of matrication.
If you even mention or begin to use it, you'll be called a socialist and they'll whip
their guns out and cheat you.
Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
I'm just kidding.
It's not quite that bad.
But it is something I think we tried to push in the 1970s and unfortunately failed to
which I regret.
Because I just think things make a lot more sense in matric, but I'm not used to it.
That's diverging from the conversation at hand.
I wanted to cover, you know, this temperature and whatnot.
And I should probably talk about another term here, Kelvin.
I'm going to mention the Kelvin measurement of temperature.
I don't know if you're familiar with that at all, Mr. Fallon.
I'm actually a more in favor of Kelvin than I am, Celsius, but.
Okay.
Very good.
And we also have a problem with atmospheric pressure, what to cover.
I guess the scientific unit of measurement when we get into temperatures of something
called ATM atmospheric pressure.
And the idea is one ATM equals the air pressure at sea level, which is quite important when
you deal with temperatures because water, for instance, will boil very differently in
the mountains than does at sea level.
It's kind of common knowledge, I think.
Yeah, I was just saw a video on submarines that they spinning off their propeller because
the pressure is so high, it causes boiling over the water, even though it's still, quote,
unquote, told.
Yeah.
Yep.
And there's a lot of cool videos I'm sure you can find where they apply pressure to
a container with water inside and the water will actually boil.
That's a really big danger in space because if your suit depressurizes your blood, just
boils instantly.
So I won't get too much into that proportion.
2001 then.
How did you get from the capsule into the spaceship?
2001.
Space Odyssey.
Right?
Yes.
You know, I've been a while since I've seen the movie.
I don't remember it.
I'm not one for movies, unfortunately.
Okay.
Well, they did the same trick in what he called it.
It's a star galactica where they had to jump without a spitz, super gosh, I think.
Come on.
Come on to the show.
If anyone wants to go into a hit for your episode on whether your blood will boil or
a phone boil, if you're being locked outside of your spaceship by a crazy, a crazy computer
going right.
Feel free to do that.
Sorry, Joe.
I'll shut up.
There's a whole dynamic of air pressure and temperature and kinetic energy that we won't
get into either.
When we measure temperature, let's take a step back.
We're taking a thermometer and we're bringing it into contact with forms of matter like
air, maybe water, could be a solid.
And we wait for something called thermal equilibrium to occur where the heat flows between
these objects and its level, it's normal, sorry, neutralized, normalized.
If you put a thermometer into a boiling pan of water, it's going to take a few seconds
for it to reach equilibrium and give you good reading.
It's also called the zero-th law of thermodynamics and physics, which loosely defined as when
two objects are in equilibrium with a third.
Again, just throwing it out there.
No, I'm with you.
So good scientific terms, no.
And then that brings us, of course, into the discussion of how do we measure temperature?
How do we quantify it?
And so basically I've set up three different ways so far.
We have Celsius, Fahrenheit, and Kelvin.
And what might surprise most people is that Celsius and Fahrenheit operates off the same
logic and the same math, believe it or not.
And Kelvin is entirely different.
So let's start out with Celsius.
There was a guy by the name of Mr. Celsius.
He was a physicist from Sweden.
And he said at sea level water boils at something that we're going to call zero degrees Celsius.
So he defined zero degrees Celsius as the freezing point of water at sea level.
And kind of the converse of that is he said at a hundred degrees Celsius water boils.
So that's the definition of Celsius.
And in between that zero to one hundred, obviously is a hundred integers, a hundred steps.
So we have an interval of a hundred.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, I was brought up with this, so it makes perfect sense to me.
So, right, it's one of the things that's so simple I find it hard to describe.
But that's the definition of Celsius.
Similarly, but with different numbers, we have Fahrenheit, a physicist in the U.S., Mr.
Fahrenheit said at sea level 32 degrees Fahrenheit is the point at which water freezes.
Why?
Why do you do that?
There's no answer.
I'm going to admit I cheated on this at this point and went to Wikipedia because I was
like, where does this number come up from?
And nobody really knows.
There's no answer out there.
And then you chose...
A thousand years of morning and look at the number of us house and go, oh, 32.
Right.
There's also a hundred eighty degrees Fahrenheit then at sea level water boils.
That's even more confusing to me.
I don't know where you get a hundred eighty two and there's a lot of discussion around
it.
But for our purposes of setting up this definition is important to know 32 degrees Fahrenheit
water freezes.
Actually, I'm sorry.
I got my numbers wrong.
See?
I'm an American.
I can't even get this right.
It's 212 degrees Fahrenheit at which water boils.
It is so confusing.
I can't even keep track of it, Ken.
I was looking at the thing and I was saying, you're a bit wrong there.
Yeah.
I said, I'm flying off of this with what I wrote on paper.
So if we do our math, how many numbers in an interval, 180 minus 130, I'm sorry, 180.
Gosh.
1212 minus 32 is 180.
So there's 180 numbers.
Why did he stop on two?
I don't know.
But for our purposes here, what we need to know is that the interval of Celsius contains
a hundred different numbers.
What's it?
Fahrenheit.
It's a hundred eighty.
So right there, we can see why in America, we talk about numbers in the 20s, 30s, and
40s, and 50s.
We have to have a hundred eighty numbers reference temperature from for our normal
day use.
Yeah.
But that means, right, that for the polkies of this world, averaging up a little, one
degree Celsius is a little bit like one degree Fahrenheit or two degrees Fahrenheit.
Yes.
And so we're not going to be able to tell the difference between one or two degrees.
Come on.
One degree Celsius is enough of a micro unit, my opinion, to be able to tell the difference.
Yes.
And that also brings up a good question for any person to think about the math.
Is it linear?
You know?
Okay.
And the answer is yes.
That allows us to do something really cool here.
And I won't go over the math on there, but you can set up two equations that relate
Celsius and Fahrenheit, solve a linear system of two equations, and what you'll come up
of course is with the formulas for, you know, converting, for example, Fahrenheit to Celsius
where nine divided by five, which also equals 1.8, nine divided by five Celsius plus 32 gives
you the temperature of Celsius and Fahrenheit.
Do some more algebra.
You can rearrange it.
So the math behind it isn't too hard.
I think it took me 10, 15 minutes to figure that out.
But there is a way to convert between the two.
And they actually operate on the same logic.
So when you ask the question of, what's the logic of Fahrenheit?
It's the same thing as Celsius.
The intervals just very different.
That makes sense.
No, it doesn't make sense.
Where did you pick 32 from?
Right.
That's the part where it doesn't make sense.
Where did they get the numbers from?
There's not an easy answer I should say.
Also.
So correctly from round the Kelvin scale just decided there is a physical thing called
absolute zero.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And we're going to call that zero.
Right.
And if you want to talk about distinguishing Celsius from Fahrenheit, there isn't that much.
The difference because, you know, Celsius and Fahrenheit, you're looking at the matter
state of water, water freezing or boiling.
Kelvin is completely different.
It's this really cool theoretical, existent state where all the molecules in the universe
stop moving, which is a mere impossibility because you and I would be completely dead.
And Kelvin says, hey, zero degrees Kelvin is that point at which all matter ceases to
stop actually all the kinetic energy stops, all the molecules start stop moving.
Yeah.
So that's very different from a measurement like Celsius and Fahrenheit.
Yeah.
But I thought the actual units of Kelvin map one to one to Celsius, if you just say they
do.
Yes, they map one to one.
Let me see if I have to write that down.
We brought down absolutely zero and then they use the same scale on either count from zero
off as opposed to zero Celsius, been the freezing point to water.
Yeah.
So if you ever want to convert from Celsius to Kelvin, 273.15.
So there is a relationship between Kelvin, Celsius and then Fahrenheit.
But I just want to answer to that question.
I heard everybody ask, you know, is it logical?
And it's like, what it's based on is logical, but the numbers of Fahrenheit are rather ill
logical.
OK.
That is brilliant.
Thank you very much because I did not know there were only a scale, so that makes more
sense to me now.
Yeah.
And thank you for staying around and listening to me because I can't talk to myself.
Not a problem.
Now, CNS, we're talking about questions, got a question to the HGOR audience.
And as somebody finds this sort of stuff interesting, there's probably going to be a mathematician
out there wanting to answer this.
Why do American coins not have the digits numeric digits written on them?
And why are the American dollar bills or bills money all the same size?
You know, I don't know all the answers for that.
It's funny because I'm in retail.
So every day I'm working with drawers of cash, hundreds, 50s, 20s and all that.
And I have a feeling it might be based on the East, you know, of all the bills being
the same size.
Because it's very difficult for blind people, you know?
Right.
Yeah.
Oh, I know.
I actually have one blind customer and, you know, he might bring in a 20 or something,
we break it for him and we help him understand, you know, what's there.
You got to hold the turn.
I think it's just one of those convenience things, you know?
Now he can differentiate between the 50s, hundreds and other bills because now we have
a holographic strip going around the center of it.
Fair enough.
And again, the quarter, the quarter isn't too bad because it got the word quarter written
on it.
But Nicolanda, I might have trouble every time trying to figure out what you want.
There's a considerable size difference between the two, actually.
Yeah.
But what does it mean?
Because the far end of them to the states, is the bigger ones?
The Nicol is, no, the size correspondence is not exactly true because the Nicol is five
cents.
It's a step above the penny, step below the dime.
It's, I haven't tried to figure out with this stuff.
I just counted money.
There you go.
Cool.
Well, thank you very much for doing the show.
No problem.
Hopefully somebody else out there now is itching to tell us the story of why the money is
the way it is in the U.S.
Cool.
Okay.
Take care.
Thank you.
No problem.
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