The distinction here goes deeper than calling a whale a fish (I do agree with the content of the linked essay).
If a layperson asks me what temperature is, I’ll say something like, “It has to do with how energetic something is” or even “something’s tendency to burn you”. But I would never say “It’s the average kinetic energy of the translational degrees of freedom of the system” because they don’t know what most of those words mean. That latter definition is almost always used in the context of, essentially, undergraduate problem sets as a convenient fiction for approximating the real temperature of monatomic ideal gases—which, again, is usually a stepping stone to the thermodynamic definition of temperature as a partial derivative of entropy.
Alternatively, we could just have temperature(lay person) and temperature(precise). I will always insist on temperature(precise) being the entropic definition. And I have no problem with people choosing whatever definition they want for temperature(lay person) if it helps someone’s intuition along.
The distinction here goes deeper than calling a whale a fish (I do agree with the content of the linked essay).
If a layperson asks me what temperature is, I’ll say something like, “It has to do with how energetic something is” or even “something’s tendency to burn you”. But I would never say “It’s the average kinetic energy of the translational degrees of freedom of the system” because they don’t know what most of those words mean. That latter definition is almost always used in the context of, essentially, undergraduate problem sets as a convenient fiction for approximating the real temperature of monatomic ideal gases—which, again, is usually a stepping stone to the thermodynamic definition of temperature as a partial derivative of entropy.
Alternatively, we could just have temperature(lay person) and temperature(precise). I will always insist on temperature(precise) being the entropic definition. And I have no problem with people choosing whatever definition they want for temperature(lay person) if it helps someone’s intuition along.