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China’s ‘artificial sun’ sets nuclear fusion record, runs 1,006 seconds at 180 million°F
(charmingscience.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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It's charming that the article uses Fahrenheit as a scientific temperature scale, perhaps they should adopt bananas for distance in scientific reports too.
you gotta admire the dedication to using the most absurd measurement system though
farenheit isnt even that bad compared to the other imperial units, what are you talking about lmao
I like fahrenheit for temperature "feel" because 100° is close to body temperature and is also "very hot" when used for outside temp while 0° is "very cold".
100°C is "you are boiling" and 0°C is "pretty cold, but not that bad".
For any calculations or representation of temperature outside the context of human activity though, Celsius is way better.
We could use rankine just to confuse people more.
I still have some reference books with steam tables and the like that are in Rankine (and Fahrenheit). If we’re using silly units for temperature I prefer Réaumur, that’ll really get people scratching their heads!
At least it wasn’t measured in campfires or number of hotcakes.
Damn now I kinda wanna know how many campfires this is equivalent to
A full burning campfire can hit 2000 F, so this would be about 90,000 of those
I don't think temperature works like that though lol
180 million Fahrenheit converts to almost exactly 100 million Kelvin, so I imagine the journalist just converted from Kelvin to get that number. Anyway, using 2000 F ≈ 1,366.48 K gives about 73,000 bonfires.
Temperature does kinda work like this. The Boltzmann constant k_B has units of Joules per Kelvin (energy / temperature). An energy E can has an equivalent temperature T given by setting E = k_B*T. I think it’s good enough to state that 73,000 bonfires would be collectively 73,000 times hotter than one bonfire.
And how many bonfires is a campfire?
About 2 campfires for a bonfire I guess. A normal campfire isn’t going to be 2,000 F, more like 800 F but let’s call it 1,000 F. I thought bonfire was more accurate above because the fire would have to be roaring to reach that temp.
that's honestly less campfires than I'd expect
The ones hot enough for marshmallows?
It's a fuckton.
How hot is it in Hot Pocket?
2.5 hot pocket
waow
How many cubits was this sun? At least a furlong right? And how many hogsheads of fuel did it need?
The sun is 3,007,856,729.2152 cubits in diameter
Could be a communication thing. As much as I love the metric system, for frontfacing stuff like articles, scientists have to sometimes use freedom units.
At least that was my experience with school.
And that is precisely why the Mars Polar Lander failed.
https://everydayastronaut.com/mars-climate-orbiter/
Face it, the USA has defined the inch as 25.4 mm. It did so in 1933. The country is already metric, it's been metric for 92 years.
It's time.
isn't it used by science and the military already lol
Yeah, it's just the rest of the country that needs being brought into the 21st century.
That temperature is hotter than anyone could really imagine to the point that any scale is meaningless
farhenheit makes way more sense than the other imperial measurements imo
how so?
arbitrarily setting the freezing point of water to 32 and the boiling point to 212 and then filling in the rest from there isn't what I'd call "making sense"
I guess they're 180 apart but why 32, why not 0 and 180?
the freezing point was set to the freezing point of brine, not water. doesnt make a lot of sense, but it makes more sense than inches -> feet -> yard -> mile (not to mention league etc.) what the fuck is an inch? who fucking knows, maybe the distance between your knuckles on one of your fingers??? the point is not that farenheit is good, but that the rest of the imperial measurements are even worse
yeah, I mean some eutectic brine of ice, water, and camel piss salt seems pretty scienticious to me
if anything, three barleycorns laid end to end might be more sensible lol
As someone that learned Celsius first, I can intuit Fahrenheit pretty easily in a day to day setting. Can't imagine doing science with it though
I think it's more about common ambient temperatures we encounter than the freezing point of water. 0 F is absolutely freezing, 100 F is hellishly hot, 50 F is pleasantly cool.
Now for scientific use it's fucked
eh, that's all so vibes based and varies so widely by climate as to be meaningless IMO. its like saying meters are less intuitive than inches and feet because a meter is too big and a centimeter is too small to be human scale. Boils down to what you grew up with IMO
I actually do think it's "better" in one way that isn't completely vibey though: 1 degree F is a lot closer to the difference in air temperature that humans will notice, so especially for like, indoor air, its nice to have that extra resolution to see the difference between 68, 69, 70 F without using a decimal point.