Video Transcript
If the temperature of a room is 333.4 kelvin, determine the room’s temperature in degrees Celsius.
So first of all, we need to see, well, what is kelvin. Well, kelvin is another measure of temperature. And kelvin is often used when we’re looking at absolute zero because absolute zero is zero on the kelvin scale but negative 273.15 on the degrees Celsius scale. An absolute zero is the lowest temperature possible. At a temperature of absolute zero, there’s no motion and no heat. So, it’s the lowest possible temperature we can have.
And therefore, if we surmise that zero is negative 273.15 when looking at degrees Celsius, then if we had zero degrees Celsius, this would be equal to 273.15 kelvin. And 100 degrees Celsius, which is the boiling point of water, is gonna be equal to 373.15 kelvin. Okay, great. So now we’ve got an understanding of what kelvin is, let’s try and solve the problem.
Well, in the problem, what we’re trying to do is convert from kelvin to degrees Celsius. Well, to do that, we have a little formula. And that is that the temperature in degrees Celsius is equal to the temperature in kelvin minus 273.15. And we get that because we know that the absolute zero is equal to negative 273.15. It’s also worth noting at this point that kelvin is not measured in degrees, so we don’t have degrees kelvin. We have degrees Celsius or degrees Fahrenheit, but kelvin we just write as a number.
So now, if we substitute in the values we know, we’ll get the temperature in degrees Celsius is equal to 333.4 minus 273.15, which is gonna give us 60.25. So therefore, in answer to the question, we can say that 333.4 kelvin is equal to 60.25 degrees Celsius.
