Lord Kelvin; Genius

This is my second blog today because this is an entirely different subject than my other so I thought it prudent to split them up. As you know I like to mix some substance into my blogs, politics, religion, haiku (I love haiku), etc.

Today I'd like to drop some science on you.

So here goes:

Negative temperature is stupid. Negative numbers, as with all mathematic/scientific concepts, have very specific, thorough, and unambigous definitions, with extensive rules governing the way they are used and operated on. Now the cardinality of numbers is not that complicated. Positive numbers mean a surplus, a gain, a having of whatvever they are used to describe. Inversely, negative numbers mean a deficit, a loss, a losing of whatever they are used to describe. In addition, If you experience a series of gains and losses of something you can combine them together additively to find your end quantity. You can perform other similar operations on negative and positive numbers which you probably already know and I won't bore you with, but you get the idea. There are no such operations to be performed on negative temperature. Key to the discussion of negative temperature is 0 degrees. Take for example money. A simple example, I know, but an effective one. 0 represents a distinctive position, at which, on either side, what you are doing with the money changes. If I go one way from 0 I start gaining money and the other I give it away. This is not the case with temperature. There is nothing different that happens at 0, in which we starting giving away heat instead of gaining. The laws of thermodynamics see to it that heat flows from any area of higher temperature to one of lower no matter what their numerical temperature. Okay, okay, you could argue that in the celcius scale water freezes below zero and melts above it, but thats a feeble attempt at rationalization, as the loss/gain normally associated with negative/positive numbers still doesn't apply here. Water does start to expand at low temperatures rather than contract, as all other substances in the world do, but that expansion begins at 4 degrees celsius, when it is still liquid (isn't that weird?). In fact, when all computations involving temperature are performed such as the ideal gas law (PV=nRT, remember?) they are changed out of celsius (or farenheit, but no idiots except us use that) Into the vastly more useful measurement scale of...you guessed it, Kelvin. Unlike fahrenheit a change of 1 degree kelving is equal to a change of 1 degree celsius. What is different is the placement of zero degrees. In Kelvin, 0 degrees is at absolute zero, the lowest possible temperature the universe could ever think to hope to achieve, 273.15 degrees below celsius zero (brrr). And what about below that? There isn't any, BECAUSE TEMPERATURE DOESN'T WORK LIKE THAT!!
So any way, when your kid comes home from middle school and tells you they learned about negative numbers and then proceeds to cite negative temperature as an example (and they will, as it was just such an example in a middle school mathematics text which started this rant), please, PLEASE, for the love of GOD, explain the difference. Thanks

Amber Lauer,
Mrs. Wizard