Okay, but as it is Life that's calibrating the thermometers. I don't really see The Universe or Everything doing that stuff, do you?
I just noticed that the thread has a five-star rating. Even if that's the result of only one review, I appreciate the sentiment.
Not all experiments dealing with liquids and phase changes are equally easy to repeat. For example, for compounds with longer melting and boiling ranges, where do you cut off melting and boiling temperatures? The midpoint, the solid end of the scale, what? Early scientists had to deal with these questions.
Oh, and water is easy to get, easy to purify, easy to recover from a gaseous state, and so on. Think about it. Gold is more abundant than certain other metals (as I recall), it's just that a lot of it is locked up in low concentrations in water and other sources that require so much energy to extract that at this time it's de facto useless and out of reach.
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mudshark: Nate's just being...Nate.
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