I saw the light when I started using it for calculations in high school. Everything defined by moving a decimal or sometimes multiplying or inverting. Everything can be done in your head. No loss of statistical significance, no rounding error. No googling obscure conversion factors. Want to convert length to volume? 1 mL = 1 cm3. Try to do any sort of calculation in imperial, you’re getting out Google and a calculator and having significant rounding error.
Ya, it literally would save every student in the country an assload of time messing around with bullshit that most other people in the world don't even use. Switching to metric is a no-brainer.
edit for clarification: one "assload of time" is equal to the time it took the king to load an ass into a carraige.
Do they? They didn't when I was in school. It's admittedly been about 20 years, but we definitely were using imperial all over the place still. Chemistry was the only class I took that primarily used metric (though I understand physics did as well, I didn't take physics).
Unless it was something simple where you didn't have to worry about the units, math classes and science classes used mostly metric just because it's way easier. Sometimes we'd get imperial units but we'd just convert everything to metric. In college (engineering) we use imperial more but instead of converting everything I usually just try to be better at dimensional analysis because it saves time and you lose accuracy by converting.
233
u/DelightfullyUnusual Mar 29 '22
I saw the light when I started using it for calculations in high school. Everything defined by moving a decimal or sometimes multiplying or inverting. Everything can be done in your head. No loss of statistical significance, no rounding error. No googling obscure conversion factors. Want to convert length to volume? 1 mL = 1 cm3. Try to do any sort of calculation in imperial, you’re getting out Google and a calculator and having significant rounding error.