#not at all inspired by my yearly obligation to get CPR certified despite the fact I never use it

[berrymascarpone]

While watching the latest episodes of TYBW, one detail caught my eye: the way that Rukia calls out the temperature as she lowers her body temperature. And when she does this, she uses…Celsius. Now, you might say that’s not too strange, all the reasonable countries use Celsius, but consider that Rukia is a near century old ghost, who before the series began hadn’t been to the living world since she died as a baby, and didn’t know how to use a straw when she first got there. So why would she use Celsius? And how does she know about Absolute Zero to the precise tenth of a degree?

Well, you might say, she did spend a few weeks in human High School, where she learned how to drink juice out of a box, and maybe she learned how to measure temperature there. And absolute zero is definitely a high school chemistry topic. But then I looked back and found…

…when Yamamoto used his bankai, he specifically mentions that it’s 15 million degrees (Celsius, presumably), aka the temperature of the core of the sun. (I looked it up, he says 15 million degrees specifically in the Japanese version too, so it’s not a translation thing)

Why does Yamamoto use Celsius??? He’s over a thousand years old, and a cursory google search shows that Anders Celsius, the inventor of the Celsius unit of measurement, lived in the 1700s. So Yamamoto must have picked it up sometime after then, but how? I find it hard to imagine that the Captain Commander himself ever goes to the living world short some major emergency like Aizen’s coup, and in that case when would he have time to catch up on the latest scientific advancements?

Perhaps the 12th Squad or some other squad (maybe Ukitake’s 13th?) that is more familiar with the living world holds regular seminars to update shinigami on the modern world? Does Yamamoto also attend occasionally? Or, is there some other way for the living world to seep in to the afterlife? Some subconscious transference that means shinigami and the citizens of Rukongai too, somehow gain knowledge of the living world through a kind of osmosis? Yhwach is able to absorb and redistribute knowledge, power, etc. of the Quincy, so perhaps the Soul King, being Yhwach’s father, has a similar ability?

Also, how does Yamamoto even know how hot he is? He probably hasn’t used this technique since the last time he fought Yhwach, which is definitely before the invention of Celsius degrees, and probably before humans measured the temperature of the sun. And I don’t think he’s the type to humor any 12th division offers to measure his temperature either. Maybe he just pulled the number out of his ass because it sounded cool, since if he really were the temperature of the sun, Seireitei would probably be literal ash.

Anyways to summarize, here are the theories:

1. That Rukia or some low level shinigami went to the human world and learned about this cool new way of measuring temperature, and the knowledge somehow filtered up to Yamamoto (though I wouldn’t put it past, say, Ukitake to bring it up in a meeting sometime)

2. That Celsius degrees were invented separately in Soul Society, and they also discovered absolute zero

3. That somehow the knowledge filtered in to soul society through osmosis, maybe through recently deceased human souls, or through some other mysterious soul king related metaphysics.