Sunday 17 January 2016

stp oder iso 1

It’s grown a bit colder over the last few days, more in keeping with the season, but I am fearful for the batch of earlier-adopters (bunnies and bulbs) that took the mild Winter as a cue that Spring had sprung. In Germany, accompanied by the rest of the world with the exception of America and perhaps Liberia and Myanmar, degrees (Grad) of temperature are of course registered in Celsius.
H informed me that the difference, though one might not often hear this in everyday speech, is expressed in degrees Kelvin. H was not sure about the reason and researching, I could not figure it out. Photo editing software—when referring to colour temperature use this parlance as well. A degree on the Celsius scale and one the Kelvin scale is of the same magnitude, and I wondered if there wasn’t some level of greater technical accuracy in putting it this way: Congratulations—you’ve lost two whole newtons! I think that formula would only work for someone being pushed off a ledge. Although Kelvins following the centigrade values (with 0° being the freezing point of water and 100ยบ being the boiling), polymath Lord Kelvin, studying the laws of thermodynamics and the relations among temperature as understood at the time, pressure and volume, ingeniously realised that an ideal gas as temperature decreased would eventually shrink to a volume of zero and all molecular motion would stop. Later, this was reckoned to be -273° C, and presented a very useful tool, though no ideal gases exist. Fahrenheit might get a lot of bashing for not being as scientifically rigorous, but zero on that scale is the freezing point of brine, salt-water—which while not absolute zero, I suppose for all practical purposes might seem so. Does anyone know why in German, the gain or loss is said with Kelvins? I’d like to know.