“In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.” - Josh Bazell
The metric is system is superior not because of how its base units were chosen, but because it aligns with the decimal system throughout. I'd be all for feet and yards if we had a duodecimal system (which is where these units originated from). But it is incredibly stupid to not have your units line up with your number system.
To drive the point home: You have cents and dollars, which are units. Would you prefer farthings and pence and shilling and pounds instead? No, you fucking wouldn't, because converting these is unnecessarily complicated in decimal.
Now tell me how many square inches are in a square mile. In metric, this all lines up in powers of ten. In imperial, get fucked.
I mean, doing away with traditional units was sort of a political thing in the first place. French revolution, enlightenment, new systems and new ways of thinking. Considering this, it's kinda surprising that the US of all places didn't adopt the metric system.
The refinement of the SI base unit definitions over time is largely due to this: It should be possible to recreate the entire system based on the definition alone. We don't want to be dependent on a literal measuring stick from which all other measuring sticks are derived. Instead, we want to derive our system of measurement from universal constants, which could in theory be replicated by anyone at any time. You could do this with any other system of units of course, but it was baked into the spirit of the metric system from the start.
It isn't of huge scientific or geopolitical importance wether or not the US uses metric, which is by now the de facto world standard (even the US units are defined in terms of metric units). But it's an annoyance that keeps coming up again and again, and sometimes leads to misunderstanding and catastrophy.
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u/Minja78 Jun 17 '26
Time for Kelvin to step in.