Converting between Celsius and Kelvin  Return to KMT & Gas Laws
Menu  There are not any high school level gas law problems that
the ChemTeam is aware of that use the Celsius temperature
directly in the calculation.  If you have a Celsius temperature
in the problem, you MUST change it to Kelvin, in order to use it
in your problem.  Sometimes your teacher might put a temperature
in the problem, but you really don't need to use it. Your
teacher is doing what he or she is driven to do: confuse poor
teenage kids. The ChemTeam understands this fully for, you see,
this is what happened in his class. (The ChemTeam is retired
now.) All teachers know this is really fun! OK, back to work.
You can convert between Celsius and Kelvin like this: Kelvin =
Celsius + 273.15. Often, the value of 273 is used instead of
273.15. Check with your teacher on this point. All examples to
follow will use 273.  A point before going on to some problems:
very often in gas law problems it looks like significant figure
rules are being viola