Dear America...Don't Be Afraid of the Metric System | Luc Rébillout | TEDxUniversityofMississippi

[Music] good evening my name is Luke I'm from France and in 2014 was the first time where I visited Mississippi all the US for that matter so back then I'm alone in the kitchen and I decided to make chicken like I've done so many times before so I take my chicken i seasoned it i preheat the oven put it in the oven and I wait and I wait and I wait and something's wrong with my chicken because it's not cooking so what is going on and then it hits me the oven is in Fahrenheit so there was no way that my chicken was going to quit at 180 Fahrenheit so this was the first time where I experienced firsthand culture shock here when you live for long enough in a new country you will experience the full stages of culture shock the first one is the honeymoon stage where everything is awesome you love everything about this new country and you don't want to leave ever then you have the frustration bring the frustration you start to notice the little details that annoy you and you compare your own country with your new country and you basically think that my country is better than yours then you have adaptation during adaptation you make the better out of things you power through and you try to work your way through your new situation and then you have acceptance you reach a new equilibrium and you start to see the good and the bad but you've made peace with it and you're ready to move on with your life so coming from a country that uses the metric system it's pretty frustrating to use all of those units that you have here so there are many reasons why I think that the metric system is superior than the imperial units but there is the story that I like to tell is the story of the creation of the Fahrenheit scale since we were talking about it so introducing Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit in 1724 he decides to create a scale to measure temperature so to create a scale it's easy you need a cold temperature of reference and a warm temperature of reference so for the cold he figured that there was this one winter when he was younger in 1708 in his home in his hometown of Poland where it was especially cold so I thought that would be a good point of reference now he just needed a warm temperature of reference so what is warm what is readily available blood blood is warm blood is readily available so some stories say that he used the blood of a horse or even his home blood the point is that it is completely arbitrary choices in comparison the Celsius scales use these properties of water from 0 to 100 between the freezing and the boiling point so in my opinion there is one scalar of the to date is better than the other well I would let you guess which one the point is that those two scales are completely arbitrary and those arbitrary choices that were made a long time ago have long-term repercussions even today when you come here you have to deal with a lot of Units like miles feet inches just two days ago I was in a classroom and the teacher had to write on the board for the students that were going to take a test that one mile was 5,280 feet because how do you remember that so I want to spend just a little bit of time on the inch y'all know the inch right but how did it come about in the first place well for that you need to go back to the 14th century and though the reign of king edward ii in England at that time it was decided that three grains of Pollock on dry and round food and two n would make one inch right so you're gonna say well this is completely archaic nobody uses that anymore white even bother well think again because next time you go and buy a pair of shoes you remember that the difference between a seven and eight is one Bala con it's a third of an inch so then again a choice that was made a long time ago has long-term repercussions today so today I want to focus on the metric system I want to told you about that because it just underwent a major change but how did it come about in the first place well for that you need to go back to the French Revolution in 1789 there were over 800 different units that were used in France and sometimes the definition would change from one town to another it was a big mess so a year later in 1790 the Constituent Assembly decided to come up with a new system based on number 10 a decimal system that would use properties of matter and the geometry of the earth they put the best minds of the of the age to work on that so that they could create a system that nobody could effectively own it would be according to their model for all people and for all times so this system underwent a lot of changes along the year we're not going to go into the details but this year in 2019 on the 20th of may is going to get a new definition and four out of the seven base units are going to redefine to be redefined but my favorite one is the kilogram because of today the kilogram is the last of the units to be defined on a physical artifact that physical artifact is a cylinder made of metal it's called the internal no prototype of the kilogram or lugar Honka as it's called usually and it's stored on an underground basement in a suburb of Paris and a three Bell glass of Bell gas gases and it's only taken out on very special occasions scientists even argue whether or not they should clean it before they take it out because you never know you could remove a few atoms so now you start you start realizing what is wrong with it because what if somebody were to drop that international prototype and remove atoms out of it well the consequence would be that the mass of the universe or actually it's numerical value would change instantaneously because by definition this artifact is once the gram exactly so we need to change that most of the other units actually all of the other units that exist are based on a fundamental concern of the universe the most famous one is the speed of light that we know exactly and never changes the speed of light defines the meter according with the definition of the second but for the kilogram there is no obvious answer what concern should we use well there is a chosen one the chosen one is called the Planck constant so without going into too much details the planck constant is especially relevant to describe the energy of particles at a very small level on a quantum level and what you need to know about it is that today we've been able to measure it to a very high degree of precision so what we're going to do just like we did for the speed of light we're going to log this value we're going to log the number that we chose for the planck constant and thanks to a carefully designed balance called the kibble balance using electromagnetic properties we can use this value and back define the kilogram and this is going to open happen on the 20th of May of this year so who cares right how is it going to affect me or you well first of all is going to be important for people working in a pharmaceutical industry because as of the 20th of May it will we will have the same accuracy to measure very small amounts of chemicals as we have for measuring very big masses like the mass of the Sun all the same accuracy all across the system and second of all the last time we did such a similar redefinition was for the second in 1967 we were starting to play with what we call atomic clocks that allow us to measure time with a precision that was never achieved before so when the second was redefined then nobody was suspecting that even 60 years later we would all be walking around with a smartphone connected to internet and GPS which are all networks that require a high level of synchronicity so for that reason I'm very hopeful that in a few years from now we will have the same types of unexpected breakthrough that will result from the redefinition of the kilogram actually major industries are benefiting already from this change and they are getting ready so if the metric system is so great why hasn't the United States made the transition yet well first of all is it the only country in that situation well not really so there is the US and there is also Liberia a small country in Africa and there is mine ma in Asia both of those two are actually in the process of transitioning right now so let's rewind let's go into 1999 I love to tell that story so NASA is sending a probe to Mars it's called the Mars climate orbiter it's supposed to orbit Mouse and study its climate so it goes on a long journey of nine months perfectly smooth and it gets there and it has to start the process the maneuver for orbiting the planet and then when the manoeuvre starts the probe is lost probably just crashed on the planet so what happened well the investigation showed that the company the subcontractor that was supposed to take care of the computations of the trajectory at the entry of orbit made computations using imperial units they use feet they use pounds they use inches and then they and then they send those results back to the rest of the program that was using metric units written by NASA so as you can imagine the on the receiving end that just completely they just got completely wrong result results and this resulted in the loss of 125 million dollars if only they had been a system that everybody could use and agree on this would not would not have happened right well to be fair the United States kind of already did adopted the metric system in nineteen sixty seventy five sorry there was the metric conversion act and the purpose of that was to promote the adoption of the metric system in the US but when you really the key word is that it is voluntary conversion and who says voluntary says we're not going to do it because it's too annoying and don't get me wrong because back in France in 1780 when they really find the unit's I can tell you the French people were not happy about it either so I understand why would you would be reluctant to change but the big companies that trade internationally they went ahead and adopted the metric system it made the design process easier and they were more competitive internationally so now they they completely transition and they reap the benefits already so now I have one question for you do you know your height in meters I know my height in feet and inches and five feet eight and a half which makes me one meter and seventy four centimeters tall so when this talk is over I would love for you to go and check out your height so that when you meet somebody like me who comes from another another country and you come to talk about that you can tell them that and if you want to go the extra mile all the extra kilometer you you can even go and figure out your weight that would be awesome but so I took the liberty of doing some research for you I want to meet you halfway I want to meet you where you are so I made some research to bring the metric system to you in values and quantities that might be more relatable for Americans so introducing the metric system for Americans so if I say one kilogram for all intents and purposes it's about two pounds all the mass of one quart of beer one meter for all intents and purposes it's one yard one key lawyer is the lengths of nine football fields put end to end including the end zones and finally the temperature actually I have one more so the leader for measuring milk for example one liter is a little bit more than one quote and finally the temperature I want to finish with the temperature because this is where we started so for the temperature we can memorize this thirty is hot 20 is nice 10 is cold zero is ice I'll say it again 30 is hot 20 is nice 10 is called zero is ice and now if you go down that scale where it's very very cold it's both it's uncomfortable for both of us right if you could down that scale the Celsius and the Fahrenheit they meet at a magic point what I'd like to say at that magic point you don't need to specify the unit it's a point where it's both uncomfortable for both of us but it's a it's a point where we can both be see eye to eye and that point is minus 40 thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 30,901

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Science (hard), Data, Education, Physics, Science

Id: fPvx27hRzF8

Length: 16min 15sec (975 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 17 2019