Temperature the International System of Units, it has subsequently been redefined in terms of the equivalent fixing points on the Kelvin scale, and so that a temperature increment of one degree Celsius is the same as an increment of one kelvin, though they differ by an additive offset of 273.15. The United States commonly uses the Fahrenheit scale, on which water freezes at and boils at at sea-level atmospheric pressure. Many scientific measurements use the Kelvin temperature scale (unit symbol: K), named in honor of the Scots-Irish physicist who first defined it. It is a thermodynamic or absolute temperature scale. Its
Absolute zero the Rankine scale (Fahrenheit-scaled increments) with increasing rarity. Absolute temperature measurement is uniquely determined by a multiplicative constant which specifies the size of the "degree", so the "ratios" of two absolute temperatures, "T"/"T", are the same in all scales. The most transparent definition of this standard comes from the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. It can also be found in Fermi–Dirac statistics (for particles of half-integer spin) and Bose–Einstein statistics (for particles of integer spin). All of these define the relative numbers of particles in a system as decreasing exponential functions of energy (at the particle level) over "kT", with "k" representing the