What is the meaning of zero in temperature degrees.plz give a simple answer that is not complicated?

Answers (2)

There are three scales.

Mr. Fahrenheit set the zero point at the lowest temperature he could find, a mixture of salt and snow. He then reasoned that freezing and boiling of water were "diametrically opposed" so he divided that range into 180 degrees. (Scientists get really loopy sometimes.) That put freezing at 32 degrees and boiling at 212 degrees.

Mr. Celsius set his zero point at the freezing point of water and the boiling point at 100 degrees, and that was that.

For a long time people played with the idea of metal expansion, which indicated an absolute minimum temperature near -273C, and no colder temperature was possible because all heat had been removed from the system. That has recently been refined to -273.15C and some experimenters have actually obtained temperatures within a few thousandths of a degree of that point.

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"In every temperature scale, the temperature of a substance rises by
one degree when a specific amount of thermal energy is added to the
substance. This "specific amount" differs, of course, with different
scales. Since the Centigrade steps are bigger than the Fahrenheit
steps, the amount of energy you need to add to go up one degree
Centigrade is more than the amount needed to go up one degree
Fahrenheit.

But the idea is this: if you start at any temperature and add that
amount of energy, the temperature goes up one degree. If you add that
amount again, the temperature goes up another degree, etc.

Remember that it's thermal energy only that counts. If you're melting
ice, for example, you add a lot of energy, but the temperature doesn't
rise, since the energy you're adding is to overcome the heat of fusion
of ice - the energy required to convert ice at freezing to water at
freezing.

So temperature goes up linearly with added thermal energy, but where
is the zero point?

The first reasonable system was the Fahrenheit system. Since the
inventor of the system had no idea of absolute zero, he just chose for
his zero the coldest temperature that was, at the time, available in a
laboratory (the temperature of ammonium chloride in ice water). Then
he needed to pick another point and assign it a number, and everything
else would be fixed. He chose human body temperature as 100 degrees
(obviously he had a very slight fever when he measured this, since
normal body temperature is around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.)

Of course this was long ago, and soon colder things were found, so
negative temperatures were required.

Centigrade was more scientific, in a sense, since its endpoints were
chosen in a purely physical way: 0 degrees for freezing pure water and
100 degrees for boiling pure water (at standard pressure - sea level,
or 760mm Hg).

Of course Centigrade also needed negative temperatures.

Later, the study of thermodynamics showed that there is an absolute
zero. In other words, you can't just keep removing thermal energy
forever, and once it's all gone, the temperature can't go lower. This
is VERY cold: -273.15 degrees Centigrade.

A more reasonable temperature in some sense, is the Kelvin scale,
where absolute zero is chosen to be zero. But since all the scientific
data were/are in terms of one-degree steps in the Centigrade scale,
0 degrees Kelvin is chosen to be -273.15 degrees Centigrade, and the
freezing point of water is chosen to be 273.15 degrees Kelvin.
(Actually, I think Kelvin is technically defined with the triple point
of water which is .01 degree different from the freezing point at
standard pressure. The triple point is where solid, liquid, and
gaseous water all exist at equilibrium, and this determines not only a
temperature and a pressure, but is very easy to duplicate and does not
require a pressure measurement.)

There's also something called the Rankind scale that's like the Kelvin
scale but uses steps of the Fahrenheit size. It's hardly ever used.

To convert from Centigrade to Kelvin, add 273.15 degrees.

To convert from Centigrade to Fahrenheit, use this formula:

C = (5/9)(F-32)

So the situation is a little strange, but we're stuck with it for
historical reasons. Perhaps an even better way to do it would be to
define 0 degrees as absolute zero and 100 degrees as the triple point
of water. But then the size of a degree would change, and all
scientific publications that have ever been written that mention a
temperature would be out of date, and that would certainly not be
worth the trouble."

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