Should the United States fully adopt the metric system?

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

Yes (normal).

[Antonio the Sixth]

Yes (normal).

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

No. Everyone else should adopt our system. Problem solved.



'MURICA!

[freefair]

The key difficulty is that metric system words are aesthetically repulsive and therefore unusable in song lyrics or poetry!
Otherwise, probably, though Imperial should be kept alongside, as in the UK .

[ElectionsGuy]

Yes.

[angus]

I think it already has.  Long ago, in fact.  In 1893 all units, including those English units commonly used in the United States were defined using the fundamental units of the SI.  An inch, for example, is defined very precisely in the United States as 2.54 cm.  Moreover, the SI units are taught in all public and private schools in the United States.  I voted yes, but the adoption was a fait accompli long before any of us were born.

Will we ever have laws requiring bananas to be sold by the kilo?  Will a law ever be passed requiring me to set my dive computer to Pascals instead of psi?  One hopes not.  Not that I have anything against using kilograms, Pascals, nanometers, Joules, etc., and in fact I use those units exclusively at work, and at home when they're more convenient than English units, and when I'm on vacation I'm perfectly comfortable hearing the outside temperature reported in degrees Celcius--which, by the way, also not the SI unit of temperature--but I'm generally against unnecessary bureaucracy.  The free market can and will decide these issues.

No, Sanchez, it's not about forcing anyone to adopt any standards.  It's precisely the opposite of that mentality that my comments are based.

You have to be reasonable.  One is a nice number.  If it makes sense to say something is one centimeter tall, then describe it as one centimeter tall rather than, say, 0.39 inches, or ten thousand microns, or one one-hundredth of a meter.  Just say "one centimeter"  Similarly, if something is about one foot tall, then it's easier to just say that it's "one foot" tall rather than something more cumbersome.  One light year is called "one light year" because it's so much easier than calling it "9.46 × 10^15 meters."  Always use "one" when possible, and let your unit conform to that, otherwise you're just creating unnecessary burden.  Sometimes it isn't possible, of course.  "2.7 Joules" for example is hard to turn into a "one" since it equals 0.0026 BTU, or 0.657 calories, etc.  But don't throw the baby out with the bath water.  

(By the way, the density of water at its densest is one pound per pint, just as it is one kilogram per liter; and the specific heat capacity of water is one BTU per pound per degree Fahrenheit, just as it is one calorie per gram per degree celcius; so it's not like any system has the monopoly on the concept of "one.")

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

It would be nice if we'd gone with a metric inch of 25mm (or a metric mile of 16hm), a metric quart of 1L, and a metric pound of 5dg.

As for temperature, neither Celsius not Farenheit is all that good a choice.  I'd like to either adopt a temperature scale in which the triple point of water was 1000 degrees (and absolute zero was 0). Or one in which ideal gas constant was 1 (which for metric would require degrees about one-eighth the size of what we use now.

[bedstuy]

Yes.  As much as it seems weird to Americans, the metric system makes more sense. 

One of the Interstates in Arizona uses the metric system for God's sake.  Arizona shouldn't be leading the way with being logical and tolerant of international standards.

[opebo]

Good lord no.  Have a little backbone, people.

[Sopranos Republican]

F**K OFF COMMIE BASTARDS!!!!!!! MURICA!

[Space7]

3 out of the 196 countries in the world haven't switched to the metric system.

Myanmar, Liberia, and the United States of America.

[Frodo]

Is there a more convincing argument other than 'because everyone else is doing it'?  What makes the metric system so much more intrinsically superior to our current imperial system of measurements? 

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Is there a more convincing argument other than 'because everyone else is doing it'?  What makes the metric system so much more intrinsically superior to our current imperial system of measurements? 

When it comes to trade, others are using it too is a fairly good argument.  The primary advantage of the metric system is that it is a lot easier to convert between different sized units because of the consistent use of powers of 10 (and of 1000 with the SI extensions to metric).  Even if you have no idea what a barn is, that 24000 barns is 24 kilobarns is something you already know (assuming you know the metric prefixes).

[angus]

It would be nice if we'd gone with a metric inch of 25mm (or a metric mile of 16hm), a metric quart of 1L, and a metric pound of 5dg.

As for temperature, neither Celsius not Farenheit is all that good a choice.  I'd like to either adopt a temperature scale in which the triple point of water was 1000 degrees (and absolute zero was 0). Or one in which ideal gas constant was 1 (which for metric would require degrees about one-eighth the size of what we use now.

How's that?   Nature just doesn't work that way.  Well, you can use Atomic Units (au) as much as possible when writing molecular trajectory code.  Everybody does that, but in the end you have to convert it to some recognizable unit.

Yeah, I agree that having a 1 everywhere is great, and I have put a good deal of thought into coming up with such a system, but as far as I can tell it's impossible.  The SI unit of heat, energy, and work, for example, is the Joule.  It's very simple, but that's because it has a dimensional definition:  1 J = 1 kilogram times 1 square-meter divided by 1 square-second.  The common unit of enthalpy--used not only in the US, but also in China, Europe, and elsewhere--is the calorie (and we can't even get agreement there, because a nutritionist's calorie is one thousand thermodynamic calories.)  Of course, the calorie has a nice thermochemical definition, and you end up with a 1, but it's by design, and highly arbitrary.  Still, 1 calorie = 4.18 Joules, any day of the week.  

As to the gas constant, I actually have this conversation with people regularly:  Convert everything to SI units when possible.  If the problem says, "Suppose you are pumping air into a flat tire.  Suppose that the tire has an initial temperature of 25 degrees Celcius.  Treat the expansion as a reversible adiabatic expansion of an ideal gas.  If the initial volume is three liters and the final volume is 20 liters, what will be the final temperature?"  Okay, that's easy enough (assuming you remember the ratio of heat capacities).  I would advise on that problem to convert everything immediately to SI units:  Initial T = 298 Kelvins, and use the gas constant in units of Joules per mole per Kelvins.  No problem.  

In fact, as a rule of thumb, it's good to convert everything to SI units.  After all, a cubic meter times a Pascal equals a Joule, so there's none of that silly Liter.Atmosphere stuff to mess you up on gas expansion problems.  Punching in a bunch of numbers on a calculator under duress on a timed exam is stressful enough without lots of unnecessary conversions, but the problem is that the real world doesn't work that way.  Neither here nor in China nor in Germany.  There are all sorts of units floating around.  (When was the last time you watched a weather report, anywhere in the world, when the daily maximum temperature was quoted in Kelvins?!)  I did two post-doctoral fellowships, one in California and one in Amsterdam, and I can assure you that the spectroscopists, laser jocks, and engineers in Amsterdam know exactly what a 9/16-inch wrench looks like--mostly because the company that makes the best vacuum fittings is in California, so yeah I recognize that it's a circular argument--but I also am aware that the spectroscopists there use wavenumbers, just like we do, so you have to be prepared to be flexible with the unit of energy for example.  

In any case, if a student gives you the answer in atmospheres, and you have to do a little work to figure out how many kilopascals or bars or psi or mmHg or inches of mercury that is, then it's incumbent upon you to do so.  Mostly just tell them to be sure that they include the units.  1.7 may be the right answer, but if you don't write the units, you will not get the full credit.  I encourage SI units, but you can use whatever units you want.

As for travel, I've walked on the streets of Shanghai when it's 40 degrees--it's often 40 degrees in Shanghai in the summer, believe it or not--and I know that in China 40 degrees is damn hot.  I've also walked on the streets of New York in the winter when it's 40 degrees, and I know that in New York 40 degrees means cold.  In those instances, no units are necessary.  You just have to take it in context.  If you're in the USA, 40 means put on a sweater.  If you're in China, 40 means wear as little as you can legally get away with, and wear a wide-brimmed hat.  In that case, the unit is implied, and needs no explanation.

What we do here works well.  A one-liter bottle of booze is referred to a one-liter bottle of booze, and booze is always sold by the liter or milliliter.  A 12-ounce can of coca cola is called a 12-ounce can of coca cola.  That makes sense as well.  You could, of course, call it a 355 mL can, but think about that:  three hundred fifty-five milliliters has eleven syllables.  12-ounce has two.  I ask you:  which makes more sense?  

Keep it simple, whenever possible.  No need for arbitrary rules that encumber us.


edit:  just for fun, check out this wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_constant

It gives the gas constant in 27 different units.  I have a IUPAC table in my office that gives it in 59 different units! 

[H. Ross Peron]

Yes (normal).

[Space7]

Is there a more convincing argument other than 'because everyone else is doing it'?  What makes the metric system so much more intrinsically superior to our current imperial system of measurements?  

Basically what True Federalist said.


Kilo[...meters, grams, amps...] = 1000x

Hecto[...] = 100x

Deca[...] = 10x

[...] = 1x

Deci[...] = 0.1x

Centi[...] = 0.01x

Milli[...] = 0.001x



So there are always 10 centi____s in a deci____. There are always 1000 milli____s in a deca____, there are always 1,000,000 milli____s in a kilo____. It doesn't matter what base unit you use, the system is always the same.

You probably already know many of the "fill in the blank" base units.

Meters, Grams, Amps, Moles, Hertz, Joules, Watts, Newtons, Pascals, Coulombs, Volts, and Ohms are just some of them.

It is inherently easier to learn, memorize, and apply.

[angus]

So there are always 10 centi____s in a deci____. There are always 1000 milli____s in a deca____, there are always 1,000,000 milli____s in a kilo____. It doesn't matter what base unit you use, the system is always the same.

Are we third graders?  If that's the case, then we already have "fully adopted the metric system" because that's exactly what they're teaching my son.  As far as that goes, that's exactly what they taught me in 1975.  

As I pointed out, we have adopted this system long ago.  Moreover, the US government long ago has agreed to define all units of commerce in terms of high-precision, reproducible phenomena.  NIST.gov keeps a huge catalog of such data.  When it works, anyway.  I posted elsewhere about the hardship it created for me when the website was down because all "non-essential" government functions were closed due to a political squabble.  Where we differ from China and other more authoritarian governments is that we don't have a mechanism whereby the people will suddenly accept a government that tells the people the units in which goods should be bought and sold.  Nor should we, in my opinion.  A five-gallon bucket is more easily described as a five gallon bucket than a 0.0189=cubic meter bucket.  That will be the same in your country as mine.  Don't believe me?  Go to your local hardware store and ask them whether they have 0.0189 cubic meter trash bags.  (To be fair, your gallon is 4.535 liters whereas mine is 3.786 liters.  You also probably spell liters in a strange way.  Still, even though it usually has its head up its ass, my government has a pretty good track record of developing standards, and defines a gallon exactly and our schools teach their students how to properly spell the word "liter."  So long as your country teaches its citizens how its more culturally and economically important neighbors quantify and qualify these units, I can think of no major difficulties these differences in spellings or definitions would create for reasonably well-educated people.  Can you?)

Here in the USA, we really have bigger problems to deal with.  For example, consider the obesity rate.  In any unit, it's a big problem.  To make the problem worse, the nutritional authorities have decided to quantify it with the ridiculous "body-mass index" or BMI.  Can you think of a more stupid quantifier?  It's basically the ratio of a body's mass to the square of its height.  It has units of kg per square meter, but only because it's generally reported as the mass, in kilograms, divided by the height-squared, in square kilograms.  How bizarre is that?  It would be just as stupid if it got reported in units of pounds per square feet.  We obsess over things like "what unit should it be reported in?" in stead of "how useful is this concept?"  It doesn't take into account the differences in density of adipose tissue and muscle mass, or between bone and muscle.  It doesn't account for body types and other differences.  Medical, political, and economic experts have all suggested that it should be refined, if not replaced.

Let's be honest:  unless you are completely devoid of quantitative ability, the units in which quantities are reported are not so important as the relevance of the quantity you are reporting in the first place.  Sure, I'll grant that conversions are easier to do in your head if they're based on some reasonable divisor (10 in the SI, for example), but any unit is fine so long as you report that unit.  If you go out and make a bunch of irrelevant measurements, it really doesn't matter to me what units you report them in, they're still useless.  If, on the other hand, you make precise and useful measurements, then you can report them in whatever units you prefer.  You can even use Klingon units, so long as you define those Klingon units somewhere along the way.

I'll end my involvement in this assinine thread with an anecdote.  On the Harvard bridge, which is actually nowhere near Harvard, but crosses the Charles River from Boston into Cambridge right between MIT and BU, there are markings in units of Smoots.  1 Smoot, 2 Smoots, 3 Smoots, etc., all the way up to 364 Smoots.  The unit is named after Oliver R. Smoot, a fraternity pledge to Lambda Chi Alpha, who in October 1958 lay on the Harvard Bridge and had his frat brothers mark his body lengths.  I graduated from BU, not from MIT, but I hung out at MIT because the other three members of my pop/rock band happened to be MIT students--they all had shorter hair than I did, but they were fun to hang out with and decent musicians, and pretty smart--and I learned quite a bit about the MIT cult from them.  The "smoot" unit started as a frat prank, but it has become an icon of what is arguably the world's pre-eminent center of technical and engineering academic research.  The google unit calculator has even incorporated the smoot.  Physics professors take students out to this bridge to show them the smoots in order to illustrate the concept of non-standard units.  Conversions are made, and epiphanies are in evidence.  There's nothing wrong with the smoot.  There is also nothing wrong with the light year or the foot or the parsec or even the hand, so long as you clearly, carefully, and precisely define the unit relative to a reproducible quantity.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

As for temperature, neither Celsius not Farenheit is all that good a choice.  I'd like to either adopt a temperature scale in which the triple point of water was 1000 degrees (and absolute zero was 0). Or one in which ideal gas constant was 1 (which for metric would require degrees about one-eighth the size of what we use now.

How's that?   Nature just doesn't work that way.  Well, you can use Atomic Units (au) as much as possible when writing molecular trajectory code.  Everybody does that, but in the end you have to convert it to some recognizable unit.

Yeah, I agree that having a 1 everywhere is great, and I have put a good deal of thought into coming up with such a system, but as far as I can tell it's impossible.

[...]

edit:  just for fun, check out this wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_constant

It gives the gas constant in 27 different units.  I have a IUPAC table in my office that gives it in 59 different units! 

Yup but in particular note that in base SI units, the gas constant is 8.3144621 J K⁻¹ mol⁻¹.  While you could redefine more than the temperature unit to get a lot of arbitrary constants to 1 (tho getting them all to 1 is impossible) I was assuming that we stuck with the core metric units and only redefining the temperature unit to get one particular constant to be 1.  While there are other constants that could be set to 1 (such as the Boltzman constant) by redefining temperature, setting the gas constant to 1 yields a unit of a usable size for ordinary use.  Setting the Boltzman constant to 1 does not.  Indeed, most of the schemes for so called "natural units" share the flaw that they produce unit sizes not particularly useful to ordinary uses of those units.  A unit roughly 1/5℉ in size is a useful unit size.

[TJ in Oregon]

No, some of the English units are useful and/or so easily converted there's no point in inconveniencing everyone to make the change. We also have a lot of products already manufactured on the expectation of English units.

On the other hand, the metric system is clearly far easier to work with in almost all cases. While we may have the ideal gas constant tabulated in every units imaginable, the English system still generally requires a unit conversion with every single calculation. For example in the SI system a Pascal*meter^3 is equal to a Joule. However, a psi*gallon or whatever volume unit for English is remotely close to being a standard inconveniently does not equal a BTU. Thermodynamics is a complete mess.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     In an ideal world, yes. In reality, it would be difficult for many people to adjust to kilometers instead of miles and kilograms instead of pounds.

[dead0man]

The good that comes from it wouldn't outweigh the bad, so no.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Metric is clearly superior for scientific use but neither system is objectively better for day to day use. The costs of a switch would be immense so at most it'd have to be a gradual phase in. I wouldn't oppose new road signs posting distances in both miles and kilometers though.

[Flake]

Metric is clearly superior for scientific use but neither system is objectively better for day to day use. The costs of a switch would be immense so at most it'd have to be a gradual phase in. I wouldn't oppose new road signs posting distances in both miles and kilometers though.

^^ This

[opebo]

3 out of the 196 countries in the world haven't switched to the metric system.

Myanmar, Liberia, and the United States of America.

A mark of distinction.

[Mr. Morden]

Only if we also incorporate units of time that are also divisible by 10, and get rid of this seconds/minutes/hours nonsense.