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Crux_AMVS24 OP t1_j6m1f57 wrote

Reply to comment by lenthech1ne 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

But that’s the mistake most people make. Temperature, as ridiculous as it sounds, is not a measure of heat. The temperature of a system is a property, like pressure or weight, which in the way it’s defined, has a value proportional to the internal energy(what’s commonly referred to as “heat”) of that object. It’s meaning is completely independent of heat. So, we could just as easily have flipped it, saying temperature is inversely proportional to heat(hot has a lower temp than cold). There are actually compelling reasons to do measure “temperature” this way, in relation to the way the “heat” of an object is distributed among the particles that make it up

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lenthech1ne t1_j6m26l0 wrote

my VERY limited understanding of temperature is that its about how fast the neutrons or some scientific tiny thing is moving. higher movement speed = higher temp = higher number

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GsTSaien t1_j6mn5sh wrote

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.

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Crux_AMVS24 OP t1_j6mv1ew wrote

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

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MrTsquared88 t1_j6onyhj wrote

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”.

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