The United States pretty much has already gone metric to the extent that scientists and those involved in international trade deal mostly or exclusively in metric measurements. Slowly but surely, more and more items in the supermarket are measured in metric units. What’s left, really? Travelling distances, purchases of bulk substances, temperatures in weather reports – for non-scientific and personal functions. These uses might never go metric. The government won’t mandate it, but it won’t matter. So far as I can tell miles and kilometers live comfortably together in places like Canada and the United Kingdom.
Except for those pesky rocket scientists
This was clearly an anomaly. Part of the reason that it became a problem is that most American scientists did not expect their fellow scientists to use non-metric measurements.
Many American engineers still work in English units, including the NASA mechanical engineer in my group.
Screws. Nuts and bolts, that is. American-made products still have a lot of English-size screws. It’s still difficult to find metric ones in hardware stores. Also drill bits, tools, etc.
These could all benefit from complete conversion to the metric system.
Hate to break it to you Sport, but there is no American Football in metric countries. They all switched over to Commonwealth Football.
But that does raise a point:
What happened to Cricket fields and Rugby etc. Did those switch over? 
Good point, although this site seems to interchange “decimal time” with “metric time”. A Guide To Metric Time
I thought that was the Civil War; the South wanting to go metric.
Well, you learn something new every day.
I didn’t even need to click the link to know that you are referring to the ill-fated Mars Climate Orbiter.
A Mars guy from the JPL came to my former place of work a number of years ago, not too long after all that went down, and talked about the source of the SNAFU that’s not detailed in the report you link to:
The JPL works in conjunction with a lot of other institutes of learning and research, and some of the work on JPL projects is done at other locales. For instance, there was a promotional computer animation done for the current successful Mars Exploration Rovers, that, even though JPL has an animation lab, was created at a college in Arizona, where some of the investigative analysis of the probes’ data is being done.
Because JPL hardware has a history of outliving its mission goals, the Mars Climate Orbiter, like others, was built so that new software could be uploaded. At the time of launch the routine for calculating the orbital entry trajectory had not even been completed. The work was farmed out to somewhere in Texas, IIRC, and they had pawned it off on a grad student because it was a fairly simple piece of software. Of course Babbage’s Law struck, and the kid missed his deadline. Then missed the backup deadline, etc.
So here’s a probe hurtling through the void awaiting instructions, and the crucial piece of software is being “Next-Thursdayed” to death by this grad student. By the time it actually arrived, they just had time to get the trajectory numbers on the radio uplink, with no time to screen it for errors, such as, oh, assuming units of pound-seconds when sending out results to the rockets, instead of Newton-seconds which was the unit spelled out in the specs for the software.
:wally
Word. Are blue staters really so dumb as to think they’re smarter than red staters?
We really won’t know until that war is over.
The IRB gives all dimensions of rugby grounds in metres, although some are clearly derived from other units (such as the width of the post being 5.6m). On the other hand, in cricket, wickets are still one chain in length.
Look, we do have metric time. It’s called the second. This is a fundamental unit, not defined in terms of how fast the earth rotates on its axis or revolves around the sun, but rather how often some element vibrates.
As far as the metric system goes there’s no such thing as “minutes”, “hours”, days, weeks, months, or years.
There’s no need to decimalize our clocks, and it wouldn’t work anyway, because the lengths of the day and the orbit of the moon and the year are not in synch.
So we have one unit, the second. If you want to devise other measures and define them as multiples of the second, go ahead, or if you want to refer to the lengths of other natural cycles…like amount of time it takes Mars to orbit around the sun, or the amount of time it takes Jupiter to rotate on its axis, or some other planet, go ahead.
Yes, true.
Why not? People use those, so those should be there.
The day is pretty important and consistant for the most part.
We don’t need the number of days in a month or a year to be decimalized. But perhaps the week could be.
Those examples are not very practical or useful to everyday life. Hours, days and weeks are.
There’s nothing wrong with using minutes, or days, or hours. But why should they be added to the metric system? In the metric system each measurable value has one unit. We have one unit of length, the meter. We have one unit of mass, the gram. We have one unit of time, the second.
There is nothing to be gained by creating other fundamental units that measure the same thing. We don’t need a second unit of length that is some arbitrary multiple of a meter, the whole point of the metric system is that we don’t have to convert. We have no problem talking about microsecond or nanoseconds, if you want to talk about kiloseconds or gigaseconds, feel free. Yes, a gigasecond won’t have any particular relation to the orbit of the earth around the sun, but why should it?
If you defined the fundamental unit of time as the “day” then there’d be no need to have hours or minutes or seconds, just centidays, millidays, and microdays. But a year would still be 365.25 days. However, the problem with defining a metric day as the length of time it takes for the earth to rotate on its axis is that this is NOT a constant, but rather a variable. The length of a day is constantly increasing by some very very very tiny BUT MEASURABLE amount. So we’d have to pick a number very very close to an actual day, but it would only be exactly equal to a day for ONE DAY.
So instead it was decided to define an arbitrary unit as a unit of time. Yes, this unit is very close to 1/86400 of a day. But the metric second doesn’t vary with the length of the rotation of the earth. Sure, it might make it easier if we defined an week as 10 days, hour as 1/10 of a day, a minute as 1/100 of an hour, and a second as 1/100 of a minute, but all that would be doing is re-using existing names for completely new units of time, very confusing. Like using a “metric foot” that is 10 inches. Why bother applying an already existing name to some arbitrary multiple of your new fundamental unit? If you want to say 10 inches you could just say 10 inches, why name it a “foot”?
Well, for humanity, time is all about periodicity. It’s important that things happen at at least roughly the same time each day, week, year, or whatever. There’s lots of reasons why that’s so — the human sleep cycle, the human heartbeat, the human culture and ritual, and so on. If you flatten out the time, you make the schedule crooked. School will start at 100:08:92 today but at 100:09:41 tomorrow.
I doubt that. Can you imagine an announcer… "He’s at the 18.29… he’s at the 9.14… and he’s down at the 0.91 meter line.
Well, then it would be fourth and centimeters, of course!
But there is no natural life-cycle based on the week. Counting days by sevens is an entirely artificial custom, which the Babylonians started because their astronomers counted seven planets in the heavens (including the sun and the moon).
And defining a “metric day” is really foolish. Can you imagine, “Today was 0.99999873542 metric days long.”
There’s no problem with using natural cycles for coordinating activities. But there’s a reason those units are undefined by the metric system. There’s one standard measure of time, the second, and all other times are determined empirically. If we define a metric day as some multiple of the metric second then either the metric second will have to be a variable, or the metric day will quickly become out of sync with the real day. If the metric day and the real day aren’t exactly equal, what’s the purpose of defining a metric day? Why not just have a day?
There have been some successes.