What Temperature is Twice as Hot as 40?

It's Not 80

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Many people hate math. I, ever the contrarian, say math is your friend (for one example, when shopping, you can figure out whether it’s a better deal to buy a product in bulk or not if you “do the math” (spoiler alert: it often is, but not always)).

But maybe you hate math because sometimes people say silly things like, “Music is math.” Math is cold, hard, facts with no emotion involved. Real/good music is hot emotion and/or tender feelings. Yes, math is involved in music, but saying that they equate to each other is like saying all we humans are is a collection of chemicals. There’s so much more to us than that.

But I’m getting off my originally intended subject. What I wanted to emphasize is that sometimes people misuse math. What they say may seem superficially logical, but a peek below the surface shows that they’re ill-informed or haven’t thought things through.

For example: I once heard a person say that the temperature had doubled from earlier in the day (it had risen from 40 to 80 (Fahrenheit)).

That wasn’t true, though — the temperature hadn’t doubled. We have to remember that the numbers we use to describe the temperature are somewhat arbitrary, hence the varying systems in use to describe the temperature (Celsius, Fahrenheit, and Kelvin, to name the common ones).

By the way, Celsius seems more logical than Fahrenheit, because using the Celsius system the freezing point of water is 0 and the boiling point is 100 (at sea leavel). Perfectly logical and intuitive! So what’s up with 32 and 212 (as the Fahrenheiters say)? Anyway, back to our scheduled programming:

Using what seems like a simplistic mathematical operation (40 X 2 = 80), you can see why a person would say the temperature had doubled in going from the former to the latter, but again, the conclusion was wrong, because the correct starting point to count from should be absolute zero (which is approximately -460 degrees Fahrenheit [-459.67, to be precise]). Counting from there (-460), +40 degrees is 500 degrees from absolute zero, so for the temperature to double from 40 above, you would have to add 500 degrees. In other words, had the statement been correct (the temperature had doubled), it would have been 540 degrees when it was uttered, and the speaker’s lips and my ears would have vaporized long before that temperature was reached. Fortunately, the temperature had only risen less than 10% (from 500 above absolute zero to 540 above absolute zero).

The change in temperature, though relatively small, was obvious to us walking, talking bags of chemicals (we were sweating instead of shivering), but the fact that we were far from melting into oblivion was music to my ears.

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ANOTHER TAKE

Another angle on this matter could be taken, though, for what if you viewed “freezing” (32 Fahrenheit) as the starting point, rather than the bone-chilling absolute zero (-459.67)? In that instance, 40 would be 8 degrees (40-32=8), and so twice as hot as 40 would be a mere 48 degrees (48-32=16). And so you could also say that 80 is six times as hot as 40 (40-32=8, 80-32=48, 8*6=48).

By any reasonable perspective, though, 80 is not twice as hot as 40.

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