If it’s zero degrees today and twice as cold tomorrow, how many degrees will it be?

If it’s zero degrees today and twice as cold tomorrow, how many degrees will it be?

Asker: jarne, 12 years

Answer

If you take “something” twice, you can only do that if that “something” itself is a number.

– If something is 3 meters long, twice as long is 6 meters.
– If something weighs 25 kilograms, then it weighs twice as much as 50 kilograms

To be able to speak of “twice as cold” you must first convert the term “cold” into a number, which you can then multiply by two.

How are you going to convert “cold” into a number? How are you going to do that? In degrees Celsius, in Kelvin, in degrees Fahrenheit ?
What is cold to one person may not be to another. Cold is not a number, cold is a feeling and it varies from person to person. So I don’t think you can just come up with a formula to calculate whether something is twice colder than something else.

If it’s zero degrees today and twice as cold tomorrow, how many degrees will it be?

Answered by

prof.dr. Paul Hellings

Department of Mathematics, Fac. IIW, KU Leuven

Catholic University of Leuven
Old Market 13 3000 Leuven
https://www.kuleuven.be/

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