Without having read the book, or knowing the history of temperature, an obvious property I’d want my scale of temperature to have is that the temperature of a mixture of identical substances at different temperatures is the weighted average of the constituent parts.
Then you can easily recreate the celcius scale. Let the temperature of freezing water be 0, and the temperature of boiling water be 100.
Mix 99 parts freezing water with one part boiling water, and mix well (and quickly, in an insulated environment). That’s 1 degree celcius.
Repeat for the other 98 combinations.
If we’re lucky the mercury in our thermometer moves up a constant amount each time, and we can avoid mixing things to calibrate our thermometer in the future. If we’re unlucky it doesn’t and we need to painstakingly calibrate all thermometers. If we’re really unlucky a scale that works on one substance doesn’t work on another and then we need to rethink this whole temperature thing again.
They discuss this in the book! The problem is that it might take different amounts of heat to raise the temperature by a fixed amount if you start from different temperature levels, so you can’t be sure the increments you get from this method are really equal.
I mean the actual temperature, which existed before humans had defined it. Maybe another non-circular way to say this is that you will get different results depending on whether you mix 99 parts ice and 1 part boiling water, vs other materials at the same temperature.
If we’re lucky the mercury in our thermometer moves up a constant amount each time, and we can avoid mixing things to calibrate our thermometer in the future. If we’re unlucky it doesn’t and we need to painstakingly calibrate all thermometers. If we’re really unlucky a scale that works on one substance doesn’t work on another and then we need to rethink this whole temperature thing again.
Without having read the book, or knowing the history of temperature, an obvious property I’d want my scale of temperature to have is that the temperature of a mixture of identical substances at different temperatures is the weighted average of the constituent parts.
Then you can easily recreate the celcius scale. Let the temperature of freezing water be 0, and the temperature of boiling water be 100.
Mix 99 parts freezing water with one part boiling water, and mix well (and quickly, in an insulated environment). That’s 1 degree celcius.
Repeat for the other 98 combinations.
If we’re lucky the mercury in our thermometer moves up a constant amount each time, and we can avoid mixing things to calibrate our thermometer in the future. If we’re unlucky it doesn’t and we need to painstakingly calibrate all thermometers. If we’re really unlucky a scale that works on one substance doesn’t work on another and then we need to rethink this whole temperature thing again.
Note that temperature does not have this property! Objects generically have different heat capacities at different temperatures.
They discuss this in the book! The problem is that it might take different amounts of heat to raise the temperature by a fixed amount if you start from different temperature levels, so you can’t be sure the increments you get from this method are really equal.
What does it mean to raise the temperature by a fixed amount before we’ve defined temperature?
I mean the actual temperature, which existed before humans had defined it. Maybe another non-circular way to say this is that you will get different results depending on whether you mix 99 parts ice and 1 part boiling water, vs other materials at the same temperature.
Or in other words:
In fact you get unlucky on both counts.