Hitting Absolute Zero Has Been Declared Mathematically Impossible

Re:Hitting Absolute Zero Has Been Declared Mathematically Im... by sparky_z on Wednesday March 15, 2017 @02:24PM (#13878474)

Even if that's a vaild approach (I have no idea if it is) I suspect that such a system would be hilariously impractical for any real-world day-to-day usage. Therefore there would be no reason for a layman to even learn about it in the first place (much like the Planck unit system).

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Re:Hitting Absolute Zero Has Been Declared Mathematically Im... by x1798DE on Wednesday March 15, 2017 @03:58PM (#13879250)

Actually, I'm not so sure. If you used inverse temperature (i.e. "coldness") and scaled it properly, it wouldn't actually be all that different, in practice, from a positive temperature scale.

Here is a plot of Temperature vs. Coldness from 0-100 C, scaled such that water freezes at 100 coldness units and boils at 0 coldness units[1]: https://i.imgur.com/fluOSY2.png

It traces out a pretty gentle curve, which seems like it's not appreciably less linear than our ability to perceive differences in temperatures (from eyeballing this: https://biology.stackexchange.com/a/28522), so probably for day-to-day use inverse temperature would be a perfectly acceptable substitute.

Of course, this is just to say that if we were starting de novo today in determining how to discuss temperature, coldness could be a reasonable choice. I don't think it actually offers substantial advantages over the current system and it would likely be very costly to switch everyone over just for the sake of making it a bit easier to think about why temperature has an absolute zero.

[1] Python source code: https://bpaste.net/show/76bf4f7c36cb

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