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Science Technology

New Book Says The Meter Is all Wrong 323

Posted by timothy from the humane-fahrenheit-inhuman-celcius dept.
Bill Klemm writes "Ken Alder's new book 'The Measure of All Things' scandalizes the metric system as 'arbitrary.' CNN has a little article about a new book that explores the 'odyssey' of Delambre and Mechain to find the perfect unit of measure."
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New Book Says The Meter Is all Wrong More

New Book Says The Meter Is all Wrong

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  • The correct measuring scale (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 02, 2002 @07:47PM (#4797926)
    0 degrees - the energy at which a hydrogen atom is at rest. 1 degree would be the energy at which hydrogen is one quantum state higher than rest.

    1 length - the distance across 1 hydrogen atom

    1 time unit - the time required for a hydrogen nucleus to vibrate once

    Then you can apply whatever kind of metric multiples you like to these and voila, you are done.

    • Re:The correct measuring scale (Score:5, Insightful)

      by KnightStalker ( 1929 ) <map_sort_map@yahoo.com> on Monday December 02, 2002 @07:52PM (#4797949) Homepage
      This is fine, but then the problem occurs that you discover your original measurements were wrong, (or just inaccurate) but the old lengths are by now established. You then will have to redefine your everyday unit of length" as 1.28462341 * 10 ^ 12 hydrodgen-atom-widths (or whatever) and it's become just as arbitrary as the meter.
    • Mass: 1 atom of hydrogen What else would be required in this system?

    • Re:The correct measuring scale (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Rick the Red ( 307103 ) <Rick.The.Red@ g m a il.com> on Monday December 02, 2002 @07:55PM (#4797972) Journal
      1 length - the distance across 1 hydrogen atom
      The French and the English have been battling for years over the question: Is the basic unit of length the diameter or the radius of a hydrogen atom?

      0 degrees - the energy at which a hydrogen atom is at rest. 1 degree would be the energy at which hydrogen is one quantum state higher than rest.
      The Americans refuse to take sides in the length debate until the French and English decide whether the measurement is taken at 0 or 1 degree.

    • 1 length - the distance across 1 hydrogen atom

      1 time unit - the time required for a hydrogen nucleus to vibrate once

      Are these values completely constant? Whenever somebody tried to convince me that something is always constant, turned out it wasn't.

      Are you sure these values haven't changed since the creation of the universe and will not change in the future?

      Also: What happens when you can measure these values more accurately? Suddenly all your old measurements are wrong.

    • Re:The correct measuring scale (Score:4, Insightful)

      by smoondog ( 85133 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @08:36PM (#4798203)
      The idea that we should use nature to determine length standards is totally ridiculous. Length should have a predetermined standard and left at that. Nature has a bad habit of changing. Do we, at that point, change the standard? Of course not. That would require recalculation of a nearly infinite number of calculations. Could you imagine having different versions of the meter?

      "Yes, I measured your property, but the architectual drawings use Meter version 19.52.6a. So I need to go downtown and figure out the conversion factor between the current version, 25.03.2c, and the old version."

      -Sean
    • Umm, no.
      Those are some fairly difficult to measure constants you've got there, and almost assuredly not enough to actually use as the basis of a measuring system. They are also almost as bad as say basing temperature on the boiling points of water.

      The "basic" units needed:
      Time
      Length
      Mass
      Charge

      With one more point thrown in for good measure:
      The zero of the temperature scale.

      Absolute zero is a very well defined place by the laws of statistical mechanics, and clearly should be left exactly where it is.

      The unit of charge should be the charge on a down quark. (1/3 e)

      The basic units of time, length, and mass should be chosen so that G,c, and hBar = 1. Those are the constant of universal gravitation, the speed of light, and Planck's constant (a constant from quantum mechanics related to wave/particle duality.)

      All the other units fall out from these:
      unit energy = (unit mass)(unit length)^2/(unit time)^2
      temperature degree = 1/(unit energy) ...
    • Who cares about hydrogen? Why not base everything off of the most basic unit possible: the planck length [ucr.edu], time, and mass [uoregon.edu], and consequently the planck energy and every other unit. Just find some arbitrary number by which to multiply the units to some practical range (something base-10 is obvious, but maybe there is some more mathematically profound multiple, like pi, which would be more useful), and you have an entire system of measurement.
    • It's going to be pretty hard to get an accurate measurement of the distance across a hydrogen atom, with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle futzing around with that electron.
      • " with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle futzing around with that electron."

        Somebody mod this way up...
      • The heisenberg uncertainty principle states that it is impossible to know both the speed and location of a particle with infinite accuracy at the same time, rather, it says that the product of the error in the measurement of speed and the error in the measurement of location should always be larger than hbar/2. If you don't care about the speed of a hydrogen atom you could know it's location with infinite accuracy (zero error). Same goes for energy and time (you can't know the energy of a particle and the time at which it had that energy at the same time with perfect accuracy). Distance across a hydrogen atom is something else though, I doubt wether anyone would be able to measure it at all with any accuracy... something like the average distance between the nucleus and the orbiting electron when in ground state at a random kelvin temperature > 0 (because the distance is zero at zero kelvin) would be needed.. seems very arbitrary though....
        My preference for a distance unit is something related to the distance light travels in vacuum over a given timespan.
    • according to nist.gov [nist.gov]:
      The meter is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum
      during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second.

      follow the link for the exact definition of a second
      (determined by a number of periods of a cesium-133 atom).
      i find it odd that nether this slashdot article nor the cnn piece mention these.
    • 0 degrees - the energy at which a hydrogen atom is at rest. 1 degree would be the energy at which hydrogen is one quantum state higher than rest.

      By saying "degrees" I take it you are referring to temperature... but energy is NOT the same thing as temperature, even though they are often linked. I believe you're thinking of something more along the lines of electron-volts (eV). The "volt" is what you'd need to re-define in order to normalize your energy scale with respect to this bound electron.

      However, some people might find that saying "the nearest gas station is about 1x10^15 distances away" a tad bit inconvenient. Atoms are pretty "fuzzy" anyway so the only length you can go by is the bohr radius, which is an oversimplification of the actual probalistic structure of a hydrogen atom. But if we want to develop units from the atomic scale, wouldn't it be better to define length as the distance travelled by light in a vacuum during the time it takes hydrogen to "vibrate" once?

      As for the hydrogen's rest energy, well that is essentially defined by its mass (times speed of light squared). So maybe it's better to define a hydrogen atom as having a mass unit of 1 and then derive energy from that.
      Hmmm.... wait a minute, hydrogen is just a proton and an electron. Electrons have negligible mass compared to a proton. Why don't we just call the mass of a proton "1 mass unit," that makes more sense because the proton is even more fundamental than hydrogen.
      If you think that's the best idea, then you're in luck, because that unit of measure has already been invented! The atomic mass! Well, sort of, since a proton has an atomic mass of 1.0073, and when you add the atomic mass of an electron, you get a value slightly higher than the atomic mass of the whole hydrogen atom... damn it. So really, no matter what you do, it's hard to define units that are completely "fundamental." So might as well just make them in terms of stuff that humans can understand, like feet, stones, and most importantly, imperial pints.

  • Arbitrary doesn't matter... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 02, 2002 @07:48PM (#4797929)
    Who cares about the actual size of the Meter. Of course it's arbitrary. All units of measurement are arbitrary....

    All I want is a system that allows easy conversion to other units. None of this 2 cups to a quart; 4 quarts to a gallon, a dozen gallons to a bushel and a peck....
    • All I want is a system that allows easy conversion to other units. None of this 2 cups to a quart; 4 quarts to a gallon, a dozen gallons to a bushel and a peck....

      Surely, the fact that the cups/pints/quarts/gallons etc system is base 2 should make it the system of choice for this audience.

      The traditional measures (`English' to Americans,`Imperial' to the British) are not as arbitrary as many people for some reason think. Volumes are base 2, because halving and doubling volumes are easy operations to do by eye. Many other things are base 12 or base 60 because these are good when you have to do mental arithmatic. there are, of course, oddities as you'd expect from a system which evolved in use.

      Base 10 is a really bad choice for anything except paper and pencil arithmetic, and only that because of an accident of history gave us a base 10 notation system. Just think how much easier life would be if whoever it was who invented positional notation has used base 12. No one uses their fingers when writing down numbers, so the link with 10 is spurious and just serves to make division and multiplication harder.

    • Why are cups better than liters? Because when you are measuring, it's much easier to double or halve something than to divide or multiply by 10. If I gave you a pint of beer, you could easily separate that into cups by dividing it in half. If I gave you 1dl of beer, could you easily separate out 1cl for me? Probably not.

      You can think of your cups, pints, quarts, etc. as powers of 2. Here are the US customary units for your converting pleasure:

      2^0: mouthful
      2^1: jigger
      2^2: jack
      2^3: gill/jill
      2^4: cup
      2^5: pint
      2^6: quart
      2^7: pottle
      2^8: gallon
      2^9: peck
      2^10: pail
      2^11: bushel
      2^12: strike
      2^13: coomb
      2^14: cask
      2^15: barrel
      2^16: hogshead
      2^17: pipe
      2^18: tun

      I'm actually a little surprised geeks are so metric-happy when we happily use powers of two for all things computer (2^10 bytes=1MB, 2^20 bytes=1GB, etc.)

  • Originally, you see, the metric unit of distance was supposed to be one ten-millionth of the span from the north pole to the equator.

    But the Earth isn't a perfect sphere -- it's an oblate spheroid, flattened at the poles --     So, does this mean that the perfect measurment for the world is the cup/chest circumference sizing standard we've been using on bras for years?

    Dang, the earth is hot.
  • why choose water as the determining factor in deciding what a gram is (g=1cm^3 of water) --> because it's the most important element to us that is easily available and pourable into cm^3 boxes. and the fact that the earth is elliptical and not circular isn't important; it's that it appears circular to us (no it doesn't appear flat unless you've never seen pictures from space). anyway, that doesn't matter b/c we define the meter according the speed of light, which is just a/b as unarbitrary as you can get. a system of measure is for use by people. thus it should bear some relation to people, and that will make it arbitrary. the most important factor is uniformity, which the meter system has in abundance.

  • Why? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Smidge204 ( 605297 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @08:00PM (#4798010) Journal
    ...And when that future failed to arrive I began to wonder why.

    Because people had been using the imperial system for so long, it became (and still is) a major undertaking to convert. You don't just say "Okay everyone, we're going to use Metric for everything now!"..

    There are books of formulas, constants, tables and charts that need to be rewritten. There are machines that need to be rebuilt and redesigned. There are entire conventions that need to be done away with and started afresh. This is extreamely difficult, costly and possibly dangerous to just 'do'.

    Only in the more modern technologies has the metric system really taken hold, and everything else has been undergoing a gradual conversion.

    The metric system has many advantages over the imperial system... like having destinct units for mass and force: grams and newtons as opposed to just 'pounds' (pound-mass, which must be converted to slugs for calculations, and pound-force). As well as not having any unweildy fractions. Non of that 15/32 of an inch.

    However, that does not make the imperial system any less useful. If you really think about it, any measurement system is going to be arbitrary, and it will be valid as long as it's consistent.
    =Smidge=

    • Re:Why? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Crazy Ukrainian ( 581427 )
      So just because it is "a major undertaking to convert" we shouldn't do it? Are we to keep saying that just because its too much work it shouldn't be done at all? I know most of use here are lazy, but come on, it doesn't all have to be done at once. Start in the brainwashing facilities the US calls schools, and work your way up. And the imperial system IS less usefull. Like you said, it can be annoying to work with, and since most of the world uses metric, it makes unit communication a pain too. Just convert and be done with it.

    • Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by metalpet ( 557056 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @09:14PM (#4798418) Journal
      Well, france and a bunch of other countries kinda just said "okay everyone, we're going to use Metric for everything now!" (but they said it in french. it probably sounded smoother).

      Is switching to the unit system everybody else uses on earth harder than say, switch to an arbitrary new currency like the Euro?

      Some would argue the US did make it harder for itself by waiting so long. In the end, it's really a matter of motivation.
      As long the US doesn't see a need to follow what other countries are doing, things won't change.
      That is the real reason, more than "oh well, it's kinda hard to do".

      It will be a sign of a major change of attitude when the US finally decides to do the switch.
      Who knows what will be next? ratifying a kyoto treaty? playing nice with the other kids^H^H^H^Hnations at the UN? The possibilities are endless.

  • You got that right (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    it's Metre...

    The US dosn't use or approve of the metric system, so why does it need to change the spelling?

  • what we need to do next is do away with the hour, minute, etc. As in Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky [amazon.com].

  • Sigh. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @08:06PM (#4798038)
    A quote:

    "I remember my fifth-grade teacher instructing us in the metric system and telling us we would need to learn this material because we would all be using it in the future," he says. "I believed her, of course. And when that future failed to arrive I began to wonder why.

    He should get a clue, the rest of the world uses the metric system, this future has materialized. If one country wants to be stubborn and hold out, whatever.

    Anyhow, the real beauty of the metric system is that it's various units of measurements make sense. As in, a centimeter is a hundredth of a meter, a millimeter is a thousands of a meter, etc. The imperial system wouldn't be so strange if it was 10 inches to a foot, but it's not.

    Anyhow, the meter is not the only part of the metric system, it also encompasses temperature, weight, etc. And the meter is certainly less arbitrary than the foot!

    • Re:Sigh. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Rick the Red ( 307103 ) <Rick.The.Red@ g m a il.com> on Monday December 02, 2002 @08:26PM (#4798150) Journal
      The imperial system wouldn't be so strange if it was 10 inches to a foot, but it's not.
      12 inches to a foot isn't strange at all. It's three barlycorns to an inch, and one foot is 1/10th the length of the right feet of the first ten men out of church on Sunday; thus it works out, more or less (depending on who cuts out early and who stays for coffee on any given Sunday) to 12 inches per foot.

      It's all quite simple, really. Just because the French can't understand it is no reason for us to abandon a perfectly good system of measurement.

  • So what? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jericho4.0 ( 565125 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @08:06PM (#4798039)
    Who the hell cares that the meter is arbitrary? It sure beats Imperial hands down. 5,280 feet in a mile? 12 inches in a foot? 160 square rods in an acre? What the hell is that?

    You'ld think at least NASA would get this.

    • Yeah, right. Like figuring out that one third of a foot long piece of
      wood is 4 inches, instead of figuring out that one third of a 10 CM
      piece of wood is 3.33333... mm. Metric is a lot simpler. Yup. Look at
      5280 ft/mile. 5280 is evenly divisible by:
      2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 20, 22, 24, 30, 32, etc...

      Being evenly divisible by a lot of numbers is a *LOT* more useful than
      being able to multiple/divide by ten to get to the next higher or lower
      unit. The english system simply whollops the metric system at that.

      • Re:So what? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jericho4.0 ( 565125 )
        Carpenters are welcome to use whatever system they want to mesaure bits of wood. For the calculations I do, the fact that there is a sensible relationship between mass, length, volume, temp, etc, makes a lot more sense.
        • Thank you, sir, for your insightful comment. Keep the metric system where it belongs... in science where converting between mass, length, volume, temp, etc, is actually done. Leave the rest of us the heck alone. I will be using feet and inches for everything from woodworking to measuring my son's height until the day I die. What are they going to do, make my tape measure contraband? hmmm... better not suggest that... they're already doing such idiotic things on the other side of the pond... Yet, I'll gladly use the metric system where it makes sense.

  • In other news... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Violet Null ( 452694 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @08:08PM (#4798050)
    24 hours is a day discovered to be arbitrary. 100 pennies in a dollar discovered to be arbitrary. 4 quarts in a gallon discovered to be arbitrary. 67 trolls in a Slashdot article discovered to be arbitrary...
    • 24 hours does have a natural base, it is celestial in origin.

      I can't remember exactly how it works, but each day some object appeared to move 1/12th of the sky each day. Something moved on a 24-day cycle, so you could divide the night into 12 sections by using the position of this object in the sky. I can't remember exactly how this worked, but it made sense when I read it.

      60 seconds/minute or minutes an hour is closer to being metric. I think it was the Babylonians, but it could have been any of the pre-Egyptian cultures that used base 60 for their number system.
      The source for this is a book called "Number" or something like that. I can't remember exactly, and I don't have a copy with me. I did find a book called number on amazon, but I don't think it's the correct one. As there are 672 hits for the word number in science books I can't be bothered finding it.

  • we don't need new units of measure (Score:3, Funny)

    by macdaddy357 ( 582412 ) <macdaddy357@hotmail.com> on Monday December 02, 2002 @08:09PM (#4798053)
    We have the hogshead, the dram, the cubit, the bushel, the gross, the furlong, and even the jigger. There's nothin' wrong with 'em by crackie!

  • Metric System (Score:4, Funny)

    by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Monday December 02, 2002 @08:13PM (#4798070) Homepage
    Dwahaht? The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets 15 rods to the hog's head and that's the way I likes it!

    We all knew this would be posted ;)

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Even the worst SUV is better than that

        I think that you underestimate the size of my SUV. Heavy tanks are green machines compared to it, and they get five gallons to the mile (yeah, you read that right).

      • I cannot believe I'm doing this.

        $ units
        1991 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units

        You have: 15 rods / hogshead
        You want: miles / gallon
        * 0.00074404911
        / 1343.9973

        There you go; 15 rods to the hogshead is 0.0007 US miles to the gallon.

  • Not that big a deal (Score:5, Interesting)

    by helix400 ( 558178 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @08:19PM (#4798106) Journal
    It was nearly impossible to design a system that wasn't arbitrary.

    In meters, for example, mathmeticians had to use a definition that allowed others acrossed the world to also come up with an exact length. If these mathemeticians truly wanted a non-arbitrary system back then, they could have made a "master meter stick", whose length was not based on anything arbitrary. But such a system would never work, because then they would have had to ship copies of the master meter stick across the world. The ratio system was much more practical.

    Mass and volume are arbitarary in 2 ways. They rely off our arbitary meter, as well as the arbitary earth's gravity. A definition I've heard is that 1 cubic centimeter of water at sea level weights 1 gram and has a volume of 1 mL. Try taking a cubic centimeter of water to a different world, and you'll get different measurements. Today, the official definition of a kilogram is the mass of an international prototype in the form of a platinum-iridium cylinder kept at Sevres in France. (By the way, you could also say that using water is also arbitrary, since we earthlings used a commonly found liquid. The sea level is also arbitrary, since it varies across different coasts, as well over time)

    Temperature is also based off the arbitary earth's atmosphere. 0 degrees Celsius is the freezing point of water at 1 atm (the standard air pressure of earth). If you increase or decrease the pressure, you'll get different freezing points.

    Anyways, my point is, that it was next to impossible to come up with a practical system without it being arbitrary in some way or another.

    P.S. If anything in this article needs correction, please correct it. I'm probably wrong somewhere since everything I said was what I remember from years ago.

    • Re:Not that big a deal (Score:2, Informative)

      by dmatos ( 232892 )
      One cubic centimetre is one millilitre, no matter which way you cut the cake. Litres are a measure of volume, as are cm^3. It's just a different and more convenient name.

      As for water, 1cm^3 is one gram of mass at 4 degrees celsius. 4 degrees is used because it is the temperature at which water is densest. And mass is always the same, no matter what acceleration due to gravity is.

      Apart from that, things look pretty good. It may also be worth noting that 100C is the temperature at which water boils, and the second milestone (odd word to use in a metric conversation) in the celsius scale, with 100 (arbitrary) divisions between freezing and boiling.

      I'm amused by the fahrenheit system. Not only is it a bitch to spell, 0F is the temperature at which a saturated brine solution freezes, and 100F was supposed to be human body temperature, but I guess the guy was running a fever at the time or something :)
      • One cubic centimetre is one millilitre, no matter which way you cut the cake. Litres are a measure of volume, as are cm^3. It's just a different and more convenient name.

        This is only true since they changed the definition of the litre.

        And, of course, the pressure used to define centigrade degrees (and hence kelvin) and the water volume to mass relationship betwen the decimeter and the kilogram is arbitrarily chosen. So the whole mess is just as arbitrary as any other choice.

      • And mass is always the same, no matter what acceleration due to gravity is.

        Actually, that's not correct. I realize you're pointing out that mass and weight are two different things, but acceleration of any kind affects mass due to relativity.

        and 100F was supposed to be human body temperature, but I guess the guy was running a fever at the time or something :)

        I had been told it was the body temperature of a cow or some such, but I'm not sufficiently confident to challenge you on it.

    • Still, we do atleast have a meter that is defined in terms of the speed of light now, and a second that is defined in terms of vibrations of cesium. That means that we have portable definitions; the old ones were quite difficult to verify, which is why the definition was a bit off initially.

    • Actually, the kilogram is no longer officially defined by the alloy sample (at least according to my phys prof). it's based on the molar mass of C12 -- a gram is defined as 1/12 the mass of 6.0220245x10^23 atoms of Carbon-12.

      Of course, that number of atoms (Avogodro's Number) was originally defined as "the number of atoms in a 12-gram sample of C12" so it's still perfectly arbitrary. Gotta love circular definitions :).

      Don't forget Mole day on June 2nd (6.02)

    • Re:Not that big a deal (Score:2, Insightful)

      by virve ( 63803 )
      ARRRRGGHHH!

      Mass and volume are arbitarary in 2 ways. They rely off our arbitary meter, as well as the arbitary earth's gravity. A definition I've heard is that 1 cubic centimeter of water at sea level weights 1 gram and has a volume of 1 mL. Try taking a cubic centimeter of water to a different world, and you'll get different measurements.

      There are reasons why scientists are very careful about the words they use. This is complete and utter nonsense.

      I agree, however, that there will always be a degree of arbitrarity - at least with the current understanding of physics. Should some fancy-pancy theory emerge that let distances and/or time be quantized in a way that makes measuring a kin to counting, then the abitrary element will go away - but I bet that the scale will be utterly impractical.

      --

  • CNN bias? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Ellen Ripley ( 221395 )
    The CNN article appears to have been written to give the impression that Alder is anti-metric. It's necessary to read into paragraph 23 out of 26 to find out that Alder is actually pro-metric. Before that, the article quotes Alder so it looks like he's anti-metric.

  • Ahem (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Apreche ( 239272 )
    1 cubic centimeter of water = 1 millileter of water = 1 gram.

    Even though they are all arbitrary, who cares? There is no such thing as a non-arbitrary unit of measure.

    Let's say you set the unit of length equal to the diameter of 1 proton and the unit of mass to the mass of one proton. It's still arbitrary! You could have picked the radius, or the neutron, or the electron. Or a hydrogen atom. No matter what you base it on the process of picking something to base your unit of measure on is itself arbitrary. The metric system is easy, base 10, the way we think. It works.

    As they say, anything less would be uncivilized.
    • And what's a third of a milliliter? Come on folks, it's a simple question. A third of a tablespoon is a teaspoon. Base 10 is nice, but it is divisible evenly by exactly 2 and 5. Base 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6. Much easier for doing math in your head.

  • What a job! (Score:3, Funny)

    by ConceptJunkie ( 24823 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @08:31PM (#4798179) Homepage Journal
    Man, I wish I could spend all day coming up with inane assertions and then writing books about it and getting paid for it.

    Of course the meter is arbitrary! Until you get down to the quantum level EVERYTHING is arbitrary. That's the way the universe works!

    Geez!

  • Even if you somehow find something non-arbitrary, and use that, you still arbitrarily decided to use something non-arbitrary. Just because you decided to use the size of the universe before the big bang as your basic unit of measure doesnt mean that England did. Everything is arbitrary.

  • A Brit pipes up... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by The_Guv'na ( 180187 )

    I remeber the furore over the conversion to the metric system well. I was working and the lowest crappiest most poorly managed lame-arse crumbling sorry fucking excuse for a cheapo shit-hole supermarket [somerfield.co.uk] at the time.

    I prefer the metric system, it makes sense, in ways already mentioned here. What I do not agree with, is our Government forcing shops to sell stuff in metric units, and fining retailers for selling stuff in imperial units...

    What the fuck? Nobody is getting ripped off, the supply chain all the way to the shop shelf is metric, but the customers are forced to buy stuff measured in metric units; does it matter? NO! My rant is about the government fining and jailing private traders who sell in imperial measures. They are just pleasing customers! And metric units are always there to be used if desired.

    When I worked at a timber yard, long after the metrication debacle, most customers still used imperial measures. They were brought up on them, simple as that. Thus, 8foot X 4foot shhets became 1220x2440mm sheets, and 10feet became 3050mm. Great for mental arithmetic exercise.

    They could have educated people about both systems, and let people choose. Within a few decades the imperial system could be done away with quite easily. But no, it has to be shoved down our throaghts in almost no time at all!

    I'm only 20 and I remember the metric system being taught at school: Cubits, digits, palms, etc... [secretacademy.com]

    Ali

    • Why do so many people get this wrong?
      It is not illegal to sell goods in imperial measures. All goods sold by weight, volume or size must be priced in metric (with the exception of draught beer and cider, and milk if it is in a returnable container), but they may also be priced in imperial if the retailer wants to.
  • When in school, all of the teachers were teaching metrics, execpt for the shop teacher. And I liked his reasoning.

    For everyday tasks, a meter is too big of a measurment, and a centimeter is far too small.

    In addition, it's easy to accurately measure sixteenths of an inch, while it is near impossible to even measure quarters of a centimeter. Go look on a ruler if you don't believe me.

    Sure, the math works out great, but in the real world, 6 feet is much easier to comprehend than 2.4 meters (or whatever the correct conversion is)
    • Exactly. Human scale matters. These measurements evolved and survived because they were useful, not because they were mathematically convenient.

      An entire order of magnitude is often too great a span. The expression "order of magnitude" which specifically means factor of ten even implies that this is a large difference. That's why our measures evolved as they did, as small integer fractions instead. Well, that & convenient math.

      Intrpreting the phrase human scale more literally, my pace is 1 yard, as is the distance from the tips of my fingers to my nose. Excellent for measuring rope, cloth, or string. My wingspan and height, 2 yards, or 6 feet. Granted, most people do not have a pace of exactly a yard, but that's because most people are shorter, and consequently even further from an even meter pace.

      I love the metric system when I'm doing calculations that involve lots of conversions, but when I'm foughly planning the addition to my house, it's awfully convenient to pace out the distances in integer yards. When I'm measuring cat5, it's damn simple to stretch it out, nose to fingertips a few times, and look at the leftover and know it's 10 feet.

      Fractions are often easier to manipulate in one's head than decimals, especially if one is already using a convenient number like 12 as a base.

      I love SI units and the concept of significant figures for chemistry. When I'm cooking, the scale of
      gallon/4= quart/2 =pint (a pound of water) /2 =cup/8 =ounce/2 =tablespoon/3 =teaspoon
      works quite well, and the significance of the figure is implicit in the measurement used as a rule, just like the appropriate amount of torque is implied by the length of the handle on a wrench.

      Don't forget decimal time. "The benefits of decimal time are ease of calculation, a single number that can represent an exact time and date, and that can be used by everyone on the planet, or off it." As far as meeting my wife for lunch or calculating my timesheet, those factors are trivial compared with the importance of using a measure that is meaningful relative to the way I use time. Hence, no-one lives by a decimal clock. The French tried for a few years, but gave up.

      Being "multilingual" in terms of measurement is a good thing. Different circumstances call for different measures. There are people who use decimal time for technical reasons. Peculiar measures are an easy target, but those arose because they had a particular function. The jigger is a damn convenient measure for liquor. Sure, we could call a jigger a 45 mil measure, but when we do, we lose something. In addition to the convenience of using integer measures with particular meaning, there's a little culture & history carried by these things too.

      When that happens, pour me two fingers out of that fifth of bourbon, and I'll put two bits into the jukebox and we can try to talk Esperanto. Oh! Too late. The fifth is gone as a measure of liquor. Well, I can drink from a 750ml bottle.

      Don't forget about Megabit and Megabyte (as interpreted by Disk Drive manufactureres vs. everybody else.) That factor of eight is a pain in the ass. We should go to decimal computing.
    • Why is 6 feet easier to comprehend than 2.4 metres? (actually ~1.8m). I find that perfectly easy to comprehend. If you mean it has a decimal point in it, some of us can do maths. Besides, 2 metres is ~6.56 feet; it depends on the lengths you are measuring.

      You may be a little stupid, but I find it easy to measure 1/4 cm.

    • How wise! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by jotaeleemeese ( 303437 )
      Tell me wise one, how do you measure a 7th of an inch? Show me your ruler.

      Now, which every day tasks was you teacher talking about? What is difficult about measuring 20, 30 , 70 or 90 centimeters of something?

      Is 6 feet easier to comprehend than 2.4 meters? How easy it is to comprehend 3 and 13/16 feet. ANd can you comprehend 3 meters? Convert that to English system and let me know how clear is that.

      And that is not all, apart from shear memorization, how do you realte units of volume and lebght in ENglish system? In the metric system you just keep multiplying. In the English system? A bushel? A gallon? how does that relate to the feet and inches? They don't.

      Your teacher reasoning was simplistic, but alas, his problems were small. A good system, like the metric, addresses those small problems and the big ones in an elegant scalable manner easy for anybody toi understand.

      Miles, furlongs, feet, inches. Yikes!
  • Trust the French to get the unit magnitude wrong. However they did manage to copy the idea of decimal scaling from Thomas Jefferson, presumably on one of his visits to France (which he rightly felt was inferior to Virginia).

    "Jefferson continued, "where he had only tens to carry forward, it was easy and free from error." Jefferson began advocating decimal reckoning as an orderly alternative to the currency chaos in 1776. In 1784, after his "Notes on the establishment of a Money Unit," he recommended a system with the advantages of convenience, simplicity, and familiarity. The Spanish dollar was convenient in size, its decimal division would make computation simple, and its multiples and subdivisions would accord with already well-known coins. "Even mathematical heads," he admitted, "feel the relief of an easier substituted for a more difficult process." Jefferson's lucid arguments overwhelmed rival plans and the United States soon became the first nation in history to adopt a decimal coinage system."

  • Base 12 rocks (Score:5, Funny)

    by jman11 ( 248563 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @09:39PM (#4798554)
    Blaming difficult divisions on a system of measurement is stupid. The reason the metric system is so easy is that it mixes with the base we use and we all use base 10.

    All of those people arguing that metric is bad due to this difficult division need to realise the problem is base 10.

    I will now announce my plan to improve the world. We move to base 12. "How to get there?" you ask. We convert 2 letters to numbers, but which 2.

    I propose Q & X. X will be replaced by ECKS and Z where it is necessary. Q by KW, in Iraq is will be replaced by c, ck or maybe rc (Rhymes with arc). This will have several benefits, SEX ==> secks and is thus longer for everyone who speaks English. Keyboards also become smaller. 3 rows of 8, with the numerals stuffed somewhere (not sure about how to solve that).

    On the numerical side we can now convince aliens we don't count on our fingers. It will also help to weed out the ignorant (who DO count on their fingers).

    There are various benefits in terms of division.

    All numbers are now reported in base 12, the numerals are as follows: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Q X

    The best one is time: there are now 50 seconds in a minute, so we can move 2 minutes to one, then we get 26 minutes in an hour, by quadrupling the hour to 100 minutes we now get 6 hours in a day, halving the length of a second will now give us 10 hours in a day. We have just decimalised time without significantly changing the base unit. Yeah. The metric system would remain the same, but things will all of course be done in base 12, allthe prefixes still work. I should add this scheme would have put off the millenium bug for about 1000 years. The only thing remaining nondecimal is the year, which short of altering the flight path of the earth will have to remain as is. Of course there are now 275 days or 276 in a year.

    Regretfully 5 is no longer a nice number, nor is 10. The only reason we use these though is as our base is 10. Log_10 is now useless, but we add in log_12. Multiplication is easier, i think, I'm not sure of the patterns, but I'm sure multiplication by 3 and 4 is a lot nice. 6 becomes like 5 and is funky. There should be a pattern for 9 and 11 becomes as easy as 9 is currently. 13 is also really easy to multiply by.

    Another drawback is that maths will be forced to find a new name for the arbitrary variable. Variables can't just be set to X, that would not work. The multiplaction system should also probably be changed. * could work.

    The ultimate plus though is that there are now 20 letters, that respects our base people, beautiful.

    I hope you all enjoy that.
    • that's the best thought-out analysis of why we should move to base 12 I've ever seen. 8-)

      Except that the number that's no longer nice is not 10 but Q, which never was a nice number anyhow.

      Cool! Let's make our robots and AIs use base 12 (and convert in communication with us) so that when they take over they will be OK. 8-) People will never be able to go to base 12.

  • To be strictly accurate.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by WolfWithoutAClause ( 162946 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @09:43PM (#4798577) Homepage
    The definition of the meter ISN'T arbitrary. It was arbitrary.

    Now it's exactly 299792458 m/s. Nothing arbitrary about that at all.

  • Sturgeon was right, 90% of everything really is crap.
  • People in the scientific field (if this guy is even concidered to be in it) are really desperate for publishings...

    But the Earth isn't a perfect sphere -- it's an oblate spheroid, flattened at the poles -- and every meridian isn't equal because the Earth isn't perfectly smooth, either. So the meter is an average, a compromise -- a figure agreed upon by men, not handed down by nature.

    Even if you average the unit, it is still handed down by nature. It's the natural average distance from the north pole to the equator.

    Which makes the metric system, extrapolated largely from the meter, arbitrary as well. Not as arbitrary as the yard or the cubit or the rod or the mile, but arbitrary nevertheless.

    I guess he doesn't know what arbitrary is...

    arbitrary :
    Determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle.

    So he's saying that creating the meter was just on a whim? A bit of a contradiction to the statement a couple sentenced above it "Originally, you see, the metric unit of distance was supposed to be one ten-millionth of the span from the north pole to the equator."

    Yes, the actual length of the meter -- compared with what was intended -- is a mistake.

    So... who cares? I guess everybody needs to go run and buy a new meter stick that has been updated to the "sattelite measurments" that we can now do today, and you all need to go turn your cars in to get the speedometer adjustet properly. His "news" of innacuracy in the original measurements of the globe are not suprising at all... if you're going to try to publish something... an entire books worth... you need to do it on something that actually matters.

  • Wavelength of hydrogen. Binary. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by texchanchan ( 471739 ) <ccrowleyNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday December 02, 2002 @10:17PM (#4798732)
    Wavelength of hydrogen equals approximately 21 centimeters, a handy (literally, eh?) size for us humans.

    Multiplied by 2, divided by 2.

    I'll stake my cat this is in use already.

    ...Just not here.

  • Look, any measuring system is going to be arbitrary. This is because the concepts of number and measurement are human concepts invented by the human mind. They have no objective source in nature. They are simply ideas that the human mind uses to understand the world around us. Mathematics is not a science, it cannot be, since it has no subject matter. All any mathematical system can do is manipulate numbers. And numbers have no existence outside the human mind. The fact that humans cannot understand the universe without resorting to number and measurement just points out the limitations of the human mind.
  • "That fiction, however, would have enormous consequences," Alder says. "If the metric system is today used by 95 percent of the people of the world, it is in no small measure due to the 'grand fiction' that the meter was based on nature. ...

    "It would hardly have been adopted everywhere if the French had simply 'made it up.' In that sense the expedition proved to be essential to the 'selling' of the metric system, as well as for all the scientific discoveries it unexpectedly produced."

    The Metric system of measurement hasn't been adopted so much throughout the world because of its supposed basis in nature, buddy. It's been adopted because of two things: The world needed a standardized measurement that could be agreed upon *everywhere*, and it needed a system of measurement that was easy to do math with.

    Multiples of ten, Sparky. It's a hell of a lot easier to remember 1000 meters in the kilometer than it is to remember 1536 (or however many there are) yards in the mile, and a damned sight easier to do the math.
    • Multiples of ten is great, but what about multiples of 2, 3, 4, 6, 8? Quick, Sparky, what's a third of a meter? Stumped? What's a third of a yard? 1 foot! What's a third of 4 feet? 16 inches! What's a third of 5 feet? 20 inches! Know how often somebody needs to convert between yards and miles? NEVER! Or between inches and miles? WHAT's THE POINT?!? Know how often someone needs to take a measurement and divide it nicely into halfs, thirds, quarters and the like? ALL THE TIME! Geez... who would devise a measuring system that can't even be divided by 3 easily. Idiots.
  • Sorry, the metric system is not more convenient. All of you people that think that having a decimeter or a hectogram is "really cool," can go play in the corner. Guess what? If you want to measure in decimalized English units you can, let's all try to write this: 0.03" There, you did it. Each system is just as capable of measuring things as the other. English is just more reasonable.

    Besides having an economy of syllables, the English system is conveniently tuned to things that people actually experience on a daily basis.

    Fahrenheit, for example has the 2 digit temperatures conveniently spread across the majority of the temperatures that people experience; 100+ is really hot, < 0 is really cold. Every 10 degrees in between is a meaningful range of temperatures, meaning that a single digit conveys useful information. Celsius does not have this property. This is because it is tuned to humans, 100 being (now slightly off) body temperature.

    Measures of volume are similarly useful when they are based on ...wait for it... powers of two instead of powers of ten. When was the last time that you needed measures that were orders of magnitude different from one another? And the base unit, the ounce, is ideally tuned for humans. We can drink between 2 and 64 ounces. We don't need 3 digits to describe how many units are in a coke can.

    • 1. Arguing about imperial vs. metric on Slashdot is so over. However...
      2. Where the hell did you get decimetre and hectogram from anyway? These are not commonly used measurements in any country I've been to.
      3. Playing in the corner: Let's just consider the US as the middle of the room and everywhere else in the world as the corner and this could work (tip: The US is quite a bit smaller than the rest of the world minus the US)
      4. I can't be bothered.

  • Pound of feathers and a pound of lead (Score:4, Funny)

    by NTDaley ( 259087 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @01:03AM (#4799397) Homepage
    Not that it's relevant, but...

    Which is heavier? a pound of feathers, or a pound of lead?

    .
    .
    .

    The pound of feathers is heavier!
    Lead, being a metal, is measured in avurdupois weight; feathers, not being metal, is measured in imperial weight. Differences between an avurdupois pound and an imperial pound, mean that one pound of feathers is heavier!
  • Leaving out the fact that this author is a crackpot, there is something annoying about the choice of measures that is the metric system. Don't get me wrong, I think the metric system is a heck of a lot better than the imperial measure, but it has room for improvement. The most obvious indication of which is the so called "constants" in any physics equation.

    Consider, the equation for calculating the force (in newtons) exerted on a body with mass m (measured in grams) by another body with mass M (also measured in grams) where the distance between the two bodies is d (measured in meters):

    F = G m M / d*d

    To put it simply, the force exerted on a body of mass m by a body of mass M which are seperated by a distance d is proportional to the combined masses of the bodies divided by the square of the distance seperating them. What's G? G is a constant: 6.7 times 10 to the power of 8.

    The constant is required to make the math work out. That's a bit of a hack in my book. If we could combine all the constants in all the formulars together, could we come up with a unit of messure that negated the need for the constants?

    Unfortunately, to do this you need a unified theory, and we don't have that. Yet.

    • I'm not a physicist, (In fact, I'm a dork in high school.) but I believe that in quantum mechanics, one can select Plank units so everything works out (I'm not really sure which quantities are taken as bases other than c and h).
    • If we could combine all the constants in all the formulars together . . .

      it is common to define the constants particular to one discipline such that they are all equal to 1, this allowing one to leave them out of equations. for example, using geometrized units one expresses all quantities in term of centimeters, and G, c, k, and h are all set to 1.
  • The writer of the article is naive to say that the future has not materialized. Only American self-centeredness could ignore that in fact they are the odd ones out (besides England) when it comes to measurements. The rest of the world uses the metric system.

    Besides a meter is very well defined it is:
    the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during the time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second.

    Having said that 1 second is more arbitary than the meter, but the author ignores that because no other unit of time exists. (Of course you could say 1 second is the time taken for light to travel 299 792 458 meters)
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Yes it's wrong. But not by much. (Score:3, Informative)

    by AuraSeer ( 409950 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @02:17PM (#4803729)
    I just read this book a few days ago. The author is turning molehills into mountains.

    According to the book, if Mechain had gotten his numbers right, the meter should have been longer by 2 mm. That's right, just two millimeters.

    The researchers measured the width of a continent to within 0.2% of the correct value, using 18th-century equipment, in conditions that were far from ideal. (You try carrying survey equipment across a national border during a war, and see how much work you get done.) We should be impressed that they got as close as they did.

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