Why is the metric system better than the imperial system?

Great Debates
1

*Now that the election is behind us we can quietly discuss far less controversial topics. :stuck_out_tongue: *

It’s been twenty-five or thirty years since the USA started going metric and the conversion stalled long ago. About the only place it made much headway was in beverages, where getting more in a liter of pop than in a quart is somewhat balanced by a 750ml bottle of booze being slightly smaller than a fifth. Those industries that deal in large part with vendors and customers outside the US have made a generally-half-hearted conversion (those Dopers who repair their own cars haven’t thrown out their old socket wrenches yet) while those whose customers are primarily in the US have made no effort (just TRY to get sheet steel in metric thicknesses!).

Why is this? Don’t Americans like being pushed around by the French? Does the English system suit us because we so dislike change that we will continue to wrestle with a system that is cumbersome and archaic? Have the advantages of the metric system, though blindingly obvious to anybody willing to give it half a chance, not been sold properly to Americans? Or could it be that those so-called advantages have been over-sold, that the natural superiority of the metric system is a chimera, that decimals are not naturally better than fractions and are, in many cases, inferior, and that a system based on the length of Edward Longshank’s foot is ultimately no sillier than one based on a mismeasure of the distance between the North Pole to the Equator and which is codified as length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second?

2

Yes to all of the above.

One of the things I notice about metric temperatures is the prevalence of decimal points. Now, I recognize that if something is three digits (for example) it doesn’t matter if the three digits are all before the decimal points or if some of them happen to sneak in after. But a round number is still nice. The celsius scale has too big a jump between degrees.

And, since I live in a place where it gets pretty cold in the winter, the celsius scale also spends too much time in the negatives, which is simply annoying. 28 degrees F isn’t an unusual temperature. I don’t want to fuss around with negatives on a regular basis. I say we go Kelvin.

3

Your post title indicates something other than what you seem to be asking.

“Why is the metric system better” - it makes calculations about a gazillion times easier. This is why it is used almost exclusively in most technical fields, from computers to biology (though computers have some bizarre mix of measuring things in inches and other things in mm/cm).

I think the prime thing is size. It is just easier to say “17 inch monitor” than whatever the hell 17 inches is in metric (43.18 cm BTW). OTOH, when you’re talking about things that scale (cubic liters, for instance), metric is sometimes easier - we use whichever system is more convenient.

I don’t think it has to do with national pride. It’s just the way it is. Though I would prefer kilometers over miles. Miles are so stuipid.

4

Remember that we are talking about acceptance by the masses - that is, us. As a general rule, those who deal with precise measurements for a living have already switched to metric.

As for the rest of us, we don’t want to switch because we don’t need to switch. When you get right down to it, it does not affect us in our daily lives that there is no logical basis that an inch is the length that it is, or that there are twelve of them in a foot instead of 10 (or 17, or 11). What matters is that we, having been trained and taught on the Imperial system since childhood, know how long an inch, foot, and yard are, and we don’t know what a milimeter, centimeter, and meter are.

For most of us, metric is simply a foreign language. If I see a thermometer in Celsius, I then “translate” that into Farenheit to figure out how warm or cold it is. Same with volume, same with weight, etc. I don’t “know” how heavy, long, etc. something is until I translate it into terms which with I have lifelong experience.

The reason that the US has not switched over to metric is simple - no one has presented a compelling argument as to how we would be better off doing all that math in our heads.

Sua

5

I speak as one who has been through the entire conversion from imperial (‘English’) to metric during my life.

I began 100% imperial as a schoolkid in America, moved to England in the mid-70s when metric was just creeping in, then became more ubiquitous, and now live in Ireland where it’s almost blanket.

The metric system is better. At least SI units are. The actual size of the units is arbitrary in both systems, but they relate to each other better. Not perfectly, but better, and in factors of 10.

I still think in imperial for the following measurements: distances between places, personal weight, and beer when in the pub. Everything else in my head has changed over to metric. And my attachment to the other three is merely an emotional attachment, and what my society hasn’t bothered giving up yet. The next generation will probably be talking about these things in km, kilos, and half-litres.

6

Don’t forget ammunition.

I was in middle school in the late 1970s when the U.S. government made its one and only hard sell for the Metric System. (This effort pretty much ended when Reagan came to office.) I remember all sorts of educational gadgets, posters, workbooks, and glossy brochures coming our way. We also got a cool plastic “slide rule”, with little cut-out windows, that converts between various imperial and metric units. I still have it to this day. It’s so handy — only a little slower than using a calculator. :wink:

It certainly seemed to me at the time that the U.S. was going to go metric, and pretty soon too. Of course I was only about 12, so what the hell did I know? Obviously I, along with the federal government, grossly misjudged the situation.

It is interesting to examine why the U.K. and Canada, along with Australia and New Zealand I assume, essentially eradicated the imperial system by fiat, and succeeded, whereas the U.S. largely failed. (Or has failed so far. Perhaps in the long run the needs of the international economy will change our pragmatic minds.) I’m sure you’ll get many opinionated answers to all your questions.

My own opinionated answer is that Americans tend to be much more resentful of the government, and its paternal proclamations about what’s good for us, than perhaps those in other nations are. We were particularly mistrustful in the late 70s, in the wake of Watergate and the Vietnam War. In general, it’s been historically difficult for U.S. leaders to coax cooperation from the American public even in times of world war and obvious threats to the national interest, let alone over something as mundane as measurement standards. The pleasure to be had from defying the Europeans is just icing on the 9-by-12 inch cake.

For this reason, I’m grateful that the American colonists didn’t rebel until after Britain had switched to the Gregorian calendar (around 1750), the calendar now standard everywhere in the world. Lord knows that if we had won our independence earlier, we’d probably still be on the Julian.

7

The metric system is hands down the only way science works. As a Canadian I have been brought up with both system, and in going through engineering I can tell you first hand that the metric system is the only way that works

As an example, a joule is the amount of energy required to make ONE gram of water go up ONE degree Celsius. How easy is that? A Watt is then how fast that joule works such that ONE Watt will make ONE gram of water go up ONE degree in ONE second. There is nothing to memorize, and all conversions are straightforward. Can you do that with calories, ounces, Fahrenheit, and horsepower?

1000mm in a metre, 1000 metres in a Km…or
12 inches in a foot, 5,280 feet in a mile

1000 grams in a kilogram or
16 oz in a pound

1000mL in a Litre or
8oz in a cup, 16oz in a pint, 2 pints in a quart, four quarts in a gallon

the metric system has numbers like
1.4 L which when multiplied by a number is easy, such as 1.4*3 is 4.2L

Try multiplying 4 lb 3 oz by 6, let’s see, 3 oz is 0.1875 lb, so you have 4.01875 pounds, times 6 is 25.125 pounds, where .125lbs is 2 oz, so you have 25 lb 2oz

I’m currently training to be a chef and I can’t begin to tell you how much of a pain it is to have to constantly convert back and forth when dealing with ounces, pounds, pints, gallons.

I guess I should add that this has been done to death, perhaps we could rephrase the OP to show how this is another example of the US’s anti-science push, along with stemcell research and evolution that is crippling their society?

8

Americans don’t like being pushed around by anybody or told that a change is “for out own good” when it seems patronizing. I’m not saying the metric system isn’t better. Plenty of Americans use both systems and have no problem adjusting to whichever is appropriate. I don’t work on my vehicles much any more but I’ve owned metric sockets and wrenches for more than 20 years.

Some things are easy to change some are not. We can live with 2 litre soda and 750ml whiskey. Well sometimes that much whiskey can kill you but I survived a dopefest with that much.

Anyway… If someone says me that I should switch to standard metric sizes for construciton materials like lumber, plywood, sheetrock, etc. I’ll tell them in no uncertain terms what indignity they can perform on themselves. Switching those would be fine for new construction but would be a huge cockup for rennovations and repairs. Sorry, can’t get 4’x8’ sheetrock anymore so you’ll have to tear it all out and put in new metric studs at a different spacing. No F’N way.

Curiously the european lumber I often use, baltic birch plywood, is in 60"x60" sheets which is just shy of 1.5m, in thicknesses of 1/4", 1/2" and 3/4" Are the sizes just conveniently close to the inch sizes or are they made for the export to US market?

9

Change will happen gradually, the only way it really can, and pretty much the only way it needs to. Those that require the simple conversions metric offers use it already quite a bit. But in an everyday life sense, a mile is no better than a kilometer. We measure speed in distance per hour in an everyday sense, and everyday usage doesn’t dictate converting it to feet per second or anything of the sort.

It will be nice when the conversion is more or less final. But I don’t see the big deal.

10

No, you’ve just quoted the operational definition of a calorie. A joule is the amount of energy imparted by applying a force of one newton through a one-meter displacement parallel to the direction of the applied force. Also quite simple, but not quite as concrete as the definition of a calorie.

11

Millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship.

12

Oh, what a bunch of Canadian moose merde that is.

American science is alive and well, thank you. Foreign scientists are still coming here for their education and research, and American scientists are still earning Nobel prizes in droves, handily trouncing the competition beyond our numbers.

Evolution by natural selection is taught in every public school in the country, the main debate being, in some of our more underachieving states, whether theories like “Intelligent Design” (creationism by another name) should be taught alongside. This is certainly a concern to sober minded people, I’ll grant you, but it’s not a nationwide Dark Age quite yet. Also, the anti-evolution effort is not a plank of government policy, but is a grass-roots movement among parents of a certain mindset. They worry me, but their battle is entirely uphill.

As to stem-cell research, the citizens of California just passed a measure overwhelmingly to fund it to the tune of 3 billion dollars. The main controversy is over which sorts of fetuses, if any, can be used — and this isn’t just controversial in the United States. I think it’s healthy to debate the whole question, as it involves fetuses and the boundaries of human life, about which many people are understandably squeamish. Human cloning raised the same sort of concern a few years ago. It is not anti-science to debate policy in scientific research.

And hey, incidentally, our society is hardly crippled. Have you spent any time here, or are you guided entirely by sensational headlines in Canadian papers?

13

Would that it were so. I went through college always doing the metric problems rather than the english (when given a choice). Never worrying about Gc. None of that crap.

Then I get out into the real world. Almost all that I use is still English. I use Rankine more than any other temperature scale. Acutally, half the time the requirements and specifications for things are split between the two (perhaps conditions and thermo properties in English and mechanical specs in metric or vice versa). It’s not that hard, and there aren’t all that many conversions you need to know to switch between them.

14

Another Canadian here who is in science. All scientific calculations I do are in metric, bur a lot of everyday things I do in imperial.

Don’t know if its just socialisation, but imperial seems more physically intuitive for many everyday applications, especially length. An inch is about the length of a finger bone, a foot is about the length of my foot.

15

What a load of patronizing horseshit. Guess what, son - scientists are generally smart guys. They can memorize conversion charts. Just because you can’t - well, that might explain why you are becoming a chef instead of a scientist.

As it happens, American scientists do work in metric. In the rest of life, most of us never need to determine what percentage of a pound an ounce is. We just know we need an ounce, and we get it.

Sua

16

Millipicture = 1 word

17

Exactly. And fractional inches are easier to work with than decimals (except, of course, on a calculator or computer) because they are…fractions. Simple ratios like half and quarter are so easily visualized it seems like it could be instinctual.

As for the crippled US society, I recall when a Canadian dollar was worth 97 American cents. What’s the exchange rate today? :wink:

Bytegeist, I’m not that familiar with modern ammunition but weren’t most of the metric, um, calibers (look of distaste) imported, like the 9mm? Except for 7.62mm and 5.56mm NATO cartridges which were, in fact, EXPORTED? (They’re pretty much our Winchester .308 and Remington .223.)

18

It’s pretty much the same in the UK. I grew up with fahrenheit and I’m still happy rendering high temperatures as such – they sound so much more impressive. However as a gardener I find zero as the temperature at which water freezes much more convenient, as it is the difference between life and death for many plants. As soon as negative temperatures are predicted I know I must get some plants indoors and start heating my greenhouse.

19

(confused look)

But shouldn’t you have started doing that a few weeks earlier, before the first frost?

20

In what context? Weather forecasts in Metric countries do not generally use decimals. I’ve never used decimal points for temperatures in casual conversation, except when talking about body temperature (fever). Some digital controls on air conditioners have 0.5 degree steps, but I don’t find that an inconvenience.

I’ve never found it annoying. It’s pretty intuitive to think “negative = cold!” Why do you find negative numbers annoying, but 3-digit temperatures are OK? (Or does it never get that hot where you live?)