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I agree, I very much hope we’ll switch to metric in my lifetime. That said, I do think but it’s worth knowing that one of the reasons metric had a harder time

I agree, I very much hope we’ll switch to metric in my lifetime. That said, I do think but it’s worth knowing that one of the reasons metric had a harder time catching on is that the US had already standardized its units a full fifty years before the metric system was developed. So, while our systems aren’t mathematically consistent or elegant as the metric system, by the time metric came about they were at least geographically consistent, so the painful business problem this Wikipedia page illustrates - of not knowing “what is a foot” from town to town - didn’t exist anymore. One final note, a common misconception I encounter with non-Americans online is that Americans have no idea about metric. That’s not true. Metric is taught in schools and is the exclusive unit system for scientific work. We only have metric for electrical units. Certain other metric units are also common, for example liters, milliliters, grams, and centimeters are all used relatively commonly. Other units are frequently presented side-by-side with metric: mi/km or temperatures in f/c. So most Americans understand and can reason about metric units (perhaps with some discomfort), but unfortunately usage of the “American Customary Unit System” remains predominate.

Denvercoder9 6y ago
>Metric [...] is the exclusive unit system for scientific work. Lockheed Martin and the Mars Climate Orbiter beg to differ.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Which was over 20 years ago. I'm sure it's not 100% but it's certainly fair to say that the metric system is used extensively in science and engineering.
  - Denvercoder9 6y ago
    It's certainly used extensively, but exclusively is a big stretch, even nowadays. I've come across research papers from the last couple of years using feet and inches.
greenwich26 6y ago
>Metric is taught in schools and is the exclusive unit system for scientific work. Not in astrophysics and cosmology. You almost never hear of meters or grams. We use a hodgepodge of different units depending on what is most convenient and sensible. Working in the solar system? AU. In the galaxy? Light-years or parsecs. And in theoretical work, you often will encounter mass measured in electron-volts, distances measured in solar masses, or temperature measured in square meters, or (more often) everything measured in unitless quantities with no dimensions at all. It really does feel a lot like the traditional medieval measuring systems, messy but once you learn them, useful and comfortable in the mind.

Denvercoder9 6y ago

>Metric [...] is the exclusive unit system for scientific work. Lockheed Martin and the Mars Climate Orbiter beg to differ.

ghaff 6y ago
Which was over 20 years ago. I'm sure it's not 100% but it's certainly fair to say that the metric system is used extensively in science and engineering.
- Denvercoder9 6y ago
  It's certainly used extensively, but exclusively is a big stretch, even nowadays. I've come across research papers from the last couple of years using feet and inches.

greenwich26 6y ago

>Metric is taught in schools and is the exclusive unit system for scientific work. Not in astrophysics and cosmology. You almost never hear of meters or grams. We use a hodgepodge of different units depending on what is most convenient and sensible. Working in the solar system? AU. In the galaxy? Light-years or parsecs. And in theoretical work, you often will encounter mass measured in electron-volts, distances measured in solar masses, or temperature measured in square meters, or (more often) everything measured in unitless quantities with no dimensions at all. It really does feel a lot like the traditional medieval measuring systems, messy but once you learn them, useful and comfortable in the mind.