How to Convert From Kelvin Temperatures to Degrees Celsius

Transcript

How to convert from Kelvin temperatures to degrees Celsius. I'm Bon Crowder and we're talking about taking Kelvin temperatures and converting to degrees Celsius. So first thing to note is Kelvin is a scale that measure temperature just like Celsius and Fahrenheit are but we don't use the little circle for it and we don't actually say Kelvin temperature. We just say Kelvin, they are very specific about this in the science world. So what we note is that 0 degrees Celsius is 273.15 Kelvin. Now, you might remember that whole conversion from Celsius to Fahrenheit, it's kind of crazy, it's got some fractions in it like 5/9ths or 9/5ths and then you add or subtract 32 and it's all crazy. Celsius and Kelvin is a whole lot easier because it's just additive, 1 degree Celsius is 274.15 Kelvin, 2 degrees Celsius is 275.15 Kelvin. So you just go up one for each degrees Celsius, you go up 1 in Kelvin which means if you want to go the other way we subtract 273.15. So here we have something that's 300 degrees Kelvin and we're like what does that really mean? So to convert you do the 300 degrees Kelvin and subtract 273.15. Now we've got ourselves a nice little decimal subtraction problem, 5 and 5 is 10, 1, 8, 10, 6, 7, 8, 2 so our answer is 26.85 degrees Celsius, a little warmer than room temperature. I'm Bon Crowder and that's how you convert Kelvin to degrees Celsius.

Bon Crowder has taught math to over 15,000 adults in living rooms, classrooms and conferences.

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