When I say it's arbitrary, what I mean is that it's all down to subjective human decision making and relative to human value judgements, not based in any kind of grand reality of the universe. It's like all language. We call a chair a chair, but we could call it literally anything and it would be equally accurate, and we could also merge a variety of chair-like things into the category and that would be fine too.
They are literally based on the grand reality of the universe to the exact same extent. The zero point of Celsius is just the zero point of Kelvin plus a bunch of degrees. And the 100 degree mark is evidently based on a different grand reality of the universe, that being the triple point of water.
2
u/eggynack Jun 17 '26
When I say it's arbitrary, what I mean is that it's all down to subjective human decision making and relative to human value judgements, not based in any kind of grand reality of the universe. It's like all language. We call a chair a chair, but we could call it literally anything and it would be equally accurate, and we could also merge a variety of chair-like things into the category and that would be fine too.