Video Transcript
How many kelvin is 211.8 degrees Celsius?
You might be wondering, what is a kelvin? Well, I’m glad you asked. But first, we need to answer who is Kelvin? This guy, William Thompson, who later became Lord Kelvin, was a mathematician and a physicist. In 1848, he wrote a paper. And in that paper, he said that we needed a new scale for measuring temperature. In the new scale, infinite cold needed to be absolute zero. And according to him, that infinite cold — absolute zero — was at the place negative 273 degrees Celsius. Eventually, this way of measuring temperature caught on and became the Kelvin temperature scale. It’s used for measuring extremely hot and extremely cold temperatures.
To find kelvins, we now take the degree Celsius of a temperature and add 273.15. If we want to know how many kelvins 211.8 degrees Celsius is, we need to take 211.8 degrees Celsius and add 273.15. When we do that, we get 484.95. That means there are 484.95 kelvins in 211.8 degrees Celsius. Notice that a kelvin is not measured in degrees. And so, we write it like this: 484.95 K.
