| Gary Lyon - 3/1/2013 21:45
What country was the first to put a man on the moon? The metric system is part of the dumbing down of the United States.
Actually, the metric system is precisely what allowed the U.S. to put man on the Moon. High precision work means tolerances in the range of microns (micrometer, one thousandth of a millimeter).
To give you an idea, here's the notation for a micron in fractions of inches: 1/32,768 + 1/131,072 + 1/1,048,576 + 1/4,194,304 + 1/33,554,432 + 1/1,073,741,824 + 1/4,294,967,296 (approximately)
As you can see, there is no single inch number for any precise length, it has to be an addition of 7 different power of 2 fractions in that micrometer example, way past the 1/32 or 1/64 fractions. And there's no telling what the electronics or photovoltaic industry who work in the range of nanometers would need to use in the Imperial system.
So ultimately you'll have to use decimals, not fractions, so 1 micrometer is 0.00003937007874 inches. That wouldn't work either, so we'll probably measure such distances in micro-inches, for instance about 39.37 micro-inches for 1 micrometer, and maybe round it to 40 micro-inches. Which means basically that we'll have to introduce new units of length anyway, because there is no such thing as a micro-inch currently. Since the (micro)meter already exists and is an international (SI) length unit (not a French one) and is already used in U.S. by anybody (like the NASA or Intel) who needs precise measurements, it makes sense to switch to the meter for the rest too, maybe "metrifying" some of the units to make the transition easier, like saying the "new" yard is exactly one meter long or the new pint half a liter or the new pound 500 grams. After all, most of the Imperial units have already changed definitions several times in the past, either because they were not very precise to begin with (an acre was for instance the amount of land a man with an ox could plow in one day), or had different values between different market towns (or countries like the UK and US gallons) or to combat fraud.
Might take a century to get rid of the mile, just like pre-metric units did in other countries, where the league (anything between 1 and 8 miles depending on the country and the time) survives only in expressions like 7-league boots or old Jules Verne novels. By the way, the league was often metrified too at the time, and changed to mean 4 kilometers in France, 5 in Portugal.
Plus it's been decades really since the platinum kilogram, meter rule and liter container accumulating dust in some museum near Paris have been the reference standards for such metric units. As far as I know, the meter is now defined as "the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second." |
Units of measure
