The rate and extent to which chemical reactions occur

Heat capacity

When an energy transfer to or from a body is only as heat, the state of the body changes. Depending on the surroundings and the walls separating them from the body, various changes are possible in the body. They include chemical reactions, increase of pressure, increase of temperature and phase change. For each kind of change under specified conditions, the heat capacity is the ratio of the quantity of heat transferred to the magnitude of the change.
For example, if the change is an increase in temperature at constant volume, with no phase change and no chemical change, then the temperature of the body rises and its pressure increases. The quantity of heat transferred, ΔQ, divided by the observed temperature change, ΔT, is the body's heat capacity at constant volume:


If heat capacity is measured for a well-defined amount of substance, the specific heat is the measure of the heat required to increase the temperature of such a unit quantity by one unit of temperature. For example, raising the temperature of water by one kelvin (equal to one degree Celsius) requires 4186 joules per kilogram (J/kg).

Measurement

Temperature measurement using modern scientific thermometers and temperature scales goes back at least as far as the early 18th century, when Gabriel Fahrenheit adapted a thermometer (switching to mercury) and a scale both developed by Ole Christensen Rømer. Fahrenheit's scale is still in use in the United States for non-scientific applications.
Temperature is measured with thermometers that may be calibrated to a variety of temperature scales. In most of the world (except for Belize, Myanmar, Liberia and the United States), the Celsius scale is used for most temperature measuring purposes. Most scientists measure temperature using the Celsius scale and thermodynamic temperature using the Kelvin scale, which is the Celsius scale offset so that its null point is 0 K = −273.15 °C, or absolute zero. Many engineering fields in the US, notably high-tech and US federal specifications (civil and military), also use the Kelvin and Celsius scales. Other engineering fields in the US also rely upon the Rankine scale (a shifted Fahrenheit scale) when working in thermodynamic-related disciplines such as combustion.

Units

The basic unit of temperature in the International System of Units (SI) is the Kelvin. It has the symbol K.
For everyday applications, it is often convenient to use the Celsius scale, in which 0 °C corresponds very closely to the freezing point of water and 100 °C is its boiling point at sea level. Because liquid droplets commonly exist in clouds at sub-zero temperatures, 0 °C is better defined as the melting point of ice. In this scale, a temperature difference of 1 degree Celsius is the same as a 1kelvin increment, but the scale is offset by the temperature at which ice melts (273.15 K).
By international agreement, until May 2019, the Kelvin and Celsius scales were defined by two fixing points: absolute zero and the triple point of Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water, which is water specially prepared with a specified blend of hydrogen and oxygen isotopes. Absolute zero was defined as precisely 0 K and −273.15 °C. It is the temperature at which all classical translational motion of the particles comprising matter ceases and they are at complete rest in the classical model. Quantum-mechanically, however, zero-point motion remains and has an associated energy, the zero-point energy. Matter is in its ground state, and contains no thermal energy. The temperatures 273.16 K and 0.01 °C were defined as those of the triple point of water. This definition served the following purposes: it fixed the magnitude of the kelvin as being precisely 1 part in 273.16 parts of the difference between absolute zero and the triple point of water; it established that one kelvin has precisely the same magnitude as one degree on the Celsius scale; and it established the difference between the null points of these scales as being 273.15 K (0 K = −273.15 °C and 273.16 K = 0.01 °C). Since 2019, there has been a new definition based on the Boltzmann constant, but the scales are scarcely changed.
In the United States, the Fahrenheit scale is the most widely used. On this scale the freezing point of water corresponds to 32 °F and the boiling point to 212 °F. The Rankine scale, still used in fields of chemical engineering in the US, is an absolute scale based on the Fahrenheit increment.

Conversion

The following table shows the temperature conversion formulas for conversions to and from the Celsius scale.