Is The Metric System Actually Better?

this episode of real engineering is brought to you by brilliant a problem-solving website that teaches you to think like an engineer the time has finally arrived the comment section demanding imperial and metric units has gone on too long there can only be one measurement system the british imperial system like everything british is based on antiquated units of measurement like measuring your country's importance by counting the number of countries you have invaded and pillaged a measurement that made sense 100 years ago but it's time to move on weirdly the british have mostly moved on from this method of measurement and it is instead americans who insist on holding onto it well america liberia and myanmar a prestigious trio now i can already hear the people who refuse to wear masks in the comments there are two kinds of countries those that use the metric system and those that landed on the moon you know who led the design team for the saturn v this guy listen to that deep alabama accent this weight dictates the amount of fuel and the numbers of motors an american through and through ignore this photo of him those are just some german friends he made while on gap year in europe look at all his friends let's count them one two three four five six seven eight [Music] nine friends a popular man this alabama native used metric in fact he despised british units so much so that he designed a rocket during his gap year to fly to england to show them how great the metric system was the saturn v was designed like nearly everything in nasa at the time with a mixture of both metric and imperial units just read the mission reports for apollo 11 for proof of this it switches between inches and centimeters constantly it's a mess anyone working with this report would have had to be hyper aware of what unit of measurement they were using most of the design and science work was done in metric before being converted to imperial for the manufacturing and operational staff one of the most mind-boggling examples of this is the guidance computer it was coded in metric meters and kilograms are the language of science but to ensure the astronauts could intuitively understand what those calculations meant the displays inside the lunar module had to be displayed in british imperial units so even back then when computer power was extremely limited the engineers had to waste precious computational time and power to conversion this isn't just a waste of computation power errors in conversion have led to an insane number of accidents through the years some of the most notable being in nasa in december 1998 the mars climate orbiter took off from cape canaveral aboard its delta ii rocket over the course of its nine and a half month journey the orbiter needed to complete trajectory correction maneuvers to bring it into an optimal orbit insertion altitude of 226 kilometers however as the time grew closer calculations showed that the orbiter was entering mars orbit in a far lower altitude so low that it was likely going to strike the atmosphere and violently tear itself apart this is exactly what happened so what went wrong the orbiter was coated with metric units so the thruster control unit was working with the metric unit for impulse newton seconds but the controller was being supplied with pound four seconds which differs by a conversion factor of 4.45 a massive discrepancy a discrepancy that destroyed a 328 million dollar project in 1983 an air canada flight departing from montreal ran out of fuel halfway to its destination in edmonton why the ground crew knew 22 500 kilograms of fuel was needed for the flight they however needed to calculate how many liters were needed to be pumped so they used the density ratio to convert the weight measurement to a volume measurement but they used the 1.77 density ratio which was pounds per liter instead of the correct ratio of 0.8 kilograms per liter resulting in less than half the required fuel load being pumped aboard luckily the pilot managed to glide the plane down to an abandoned airfield but that little boo-boo of a conversion error could have resulted in a catastrophic loss of life these are two cautionary tales with disastrous consequences but it tells you nothing of the silent screams into the void every engineer in the world lets out when they are forced to work with both units it's just an unnecessary pain in the ass we could all do without this is the reason we need to choose one measurement system mixing units not only is tempting fate with conversion errors but it cost an untold number of hours for scientists and engineers around the world banging their head against tables when they could be using that time for something more productive i could end the video there but we need to really hammer home why metric units are the superior units so why is it better well let's start with a fundamental unit of measurement there are seven base units of measurement and with these seven we can measure everything in the universe think of them like the three primary colors of light with these three colors we can create any color in the universe by mixing them in just the correct proportions we can do the same with these fundamental units of measurement they are time length mass temperature electric current chemical amount and luminous intensity with these measures we can describe our universe velocity is a combination of length and time volume is length cubed density is volume combined with mass these measurements are the language of the universe so let's see how the imperial system handles a very simple one length an inch is a standard unit of measurement for length in the imperial system let's imagine a scenario you are designing a railing for a one mile long bridge you as a skilled and knowledgeable engineer know that two half inch bolts are more than enough to secure the railing down the posts of the railing are six feet apart alright how many inches are there in a foot 12 so that's 72 inches every 72 inches we need two bolts our bridge is one mile long how many feet is that i don't know off the top of my head and a quick google search tells me it's 5280 feet what's 12 inches by 5080 that's 63 360 inches divide that by 72 that's 880 so we need to order 1760 half inch bolts that felt cumbersome why do i need to remember all these numbers because imperial is a convoluted mess of measurement units invented by people who married their cousins that's why now let's see how much easier that is in metric how many millimeters are there in a meter it's in the name milli one thousand now how many meters are there in a kilometer once again it's in the dam name kilo 1000 given a measurement in kilometers but want meters just shift the decimal place over three places no calculation needed there is no room for error it's a simply better system even within imperial you have to constantly convert your units ounces to pounds pounds to imperial tons which for some reason differs from a metric ton by 1.6 again in metric there are 1000 grams in a kilogram and 1 000 kilograms in a ton in imperial there are 16 ounces in a pound and 2 240 pounds in an imperial ton why you aren't even following the same conversion conventions as your other units this is insanely cumbersome the chances of converging errors even within your own damn system is high never mind having to convert to metric you know what's even more insane the word for mass and weight in the imperial system is the same why because the pound was invented before we knew what gravity was that's why we just assumed mass and weight were the same thing when they aren't so we have to specify in imperial whether we mean pound mass or pound force i haven't been this confused since i watched magic mic the most ridiculous thing about all of this every single one of these imperial measurements are legally defined by the metric system america is already using the metric system and most of the population is oblivious to it freedom murica guns pew pew ura the foot is legally defined as 0.3048 meters the pound is illegally defined by 0.435 kilograms why because the metric system is run by the international bureau of weights and measures a neutral international organization whose sole mission is to create a global language of science who america is a member of and they have succeeded in an awe-inspiring way in 2019 the final metric base unit the kilogram stopped being defined by human artifacts and is now like all other metric units defined by the laws of physics in 2019 it ceased being defined by this hunk of metal and began being defined by planck's constant which is defined as 6.6 to 6 by 10 to the minus 34 kilogram meter squared per second of course to use this as a definition we need ways to define the meter and second the meter is defined as the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum in one divided by 299 million 792 458 of a second okay so how do we define a second a second is defined by the hyperfine transition frequency which is the frequency of radiation which will cause an electron to jump from two closely spaced low energy states in a cesium-133 atom each of the base units are defined like this using the unchanging language of the universe as its yardstick or should i say meter stick it's a beautiful and inspiring language that transcends the realm of humans and for that reason alone you should strive to use the metric system understanding the language of the universe is a superpower and there is no better place to become fluent in that language then brilliant did you know that you can measure literally anything you can even measure what you don't know which is something i learned through brilliant brand new course knowledge and uncertainty you intuitively know that knowing the weather 30 days from now is more uncertain than the result of a roll of a dice and a roll of the dice is more uncertain than a coin flip but why we can't physically measure 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understandable chunks you'll start by having fun with their interactive explorations and over time you'll be amazed at what you can accomplish as always thanks for watching and thank you to all my patreon supporters if you'd like to see more from me the links to my twitter instagram discord server and subreddit are below

Channel: Real Engineering

Views: 693,357

Rating: 4.7639899 out of 5

Keywords: engineering, science, technology, education, history, real

Id: hid7EJkwDNk

Length: 12min 52sec (772 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/SulfuricDonut]

Didn't even touch on one of the most frustrating things about it:

Converting AREA

N/m² = Pa

lb/in² = psi

Fair enough... But what if your values are measured in something else?

kN/mm² = GPa = 1,000,000,000 Pa

ounce/ft² = ???😱

[u/Matador32]

Holy cow, you absolutely roasted US/UK (and rightfully so).

[u/Easyteasy85]

I've had heated debates about this subject with my British born father... Imperial is such a pain! Especially when I'm forced to work with both. I live in Australia and work on boats that have Detroit diesel engines...

[u/HueyCrashTestPilot]

All of those hours making that video and he missed the fact that the US doesn't use Imperial? And never has? Even worse, he grew up in a country that used Imperial. And still does.

The 'US Customary' System (what the US actually uses) isn't even interchangeable with Imperial either, so this isn't just sematics either.

This video is just trash. I feel like their quality has really been slipping away for a while now, but this is the first one that was just simply wrong all the way down to its very foundations. I mean, this isn't even just a mistake. This comes from nothing more than a complete lack of research at all.

And the sad part is that there is plenty wrong with both Imperial and Customary. But, we can't critique either one of them if we can't even figure out how to tell them apart.

[u/how_did_you_see_me]

Can we also agree that calories are a pointless outdated unit that shouldn't be used by anyone for any reason (other than history)?

[u/Kiriander]

I gotta add, I work in metering and I have to work with all kinds of BS units, as I prefer to call them. Fun fact: the metering industry is a rather slow-moving one so the kWh is considered a standard SI unit. There's the easy-to-use convenient J, including prefixes such fancy as MJ and GJ which are other supported SI units. Separate units, I might add. Those people don't think in decimal prefixes, they think in distinct units with conversion factors between them.

Which my product has to accomodate for.

Where were we? Right, imperials. MBTU is actually a kilo-BTU just for the sake of confusion. Fun fact: my product interfaces with the more important product which dies the actual physical stuff. I'm more of a conversion layer between supranerd and somebody who had this "smart" stuff in an afternoon seminar.

I kinda get the appeal of the imperial-and-other-annoying-nonsense stuff though: if people don't get the functionality of the metric system, it's obtuse memorization either way.