Kelvin Celsius, which has the same magnitude. The definition implies that absolute zero (0 K) is equivalent to . In 1848, William Thomson, who later was made Lord Kelvin, wrote in his paper, "On an Absolute Thermometric Scale", of the need for a scale whereby "infinite cold" (absolute zero) was the scale's null point, and which used the degree Celsius for its unit increment. Kelvin calculated that absolute zero was equivalent to −273 °C on the air thermometers of the time. This absolute scale is known today as the Kelvin thermodynamic temperature scale. Kelvin's value of "−273" was the negative reciprocal
Scale of temperature below as M. Assume the set M has the cardinality of c, then one can construct an injective function ƒ: M → R , by which every thermal system will have a number associated with it such that when and only when two thermal systems have the same such value, they will be in thermal equilibrium. This is clearly the property of temperature, and the specific way of assigning numerical values as temperature is called a "scale of temperature". In practical terms, a temperature scale is always based on usually a single physical property of a simple thermodynamic system, called