Whats Wrong With the Imperial "System"
Channel: Kurtis Baute
Date: 2017-01-13

Science and society is plagued by a disease of bad units, and we need to make it stop! The imperial system is not just stupid compared to the metric system, it is a serious issue.

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Edit: Apparently I've mixed up the imperial units with the US customary units, and there is actually 6Tbsp plus 2tsp in 1/3 of an Imperial cup... Which, to be honest, only makes this more complicated and me feel more justified. Thanks to redditor u/Kelsenellenelvial for pointing that out!!

Hi, I'm Kurtis toady and welcome to the Scope of Science! I was recently trying to do some baking with my family back in Ontario and we couldn't for the life of us figure out how many tablespoons were in the third of a cup and we're pretty educated pretty intelligent people that at one point learned and use the Imperial System but we couldn't figure it out because it's five 5.33 tablespoons and well you can't measure a third of a tablespoon - we were trying to use tablespoon so you didn't have to measure a third of a cup and it turns out that you're supposed to use five tablespoons and one teaspoon. 

This is a lot like saying if you wanted to know the volume of a watermelon that's the same as five apples and an orange which makes no sense at all but this is how the imperial system works. My height for example is 5 feet and 9 inches which is kind of crazy but this is the Imperial system for example in measurement of length 20 twips is one point and 6 points is a line 12 lines is an inch and 12 inches is obviously a foot and three feet make up one yard and 1,760 yards make up a mile which is absolutely different than the nautical mile or a roman mile and if your head is spinning so it's mine and that's just a tiny sliver of distance measurement in Imperial. 

Why don't we use metric? Well in metric all you have to do to do a conversion is move the decimal place, so say you want to take a unit like a meter or a liter and transfer that into a kilometer or a kiloliter you have to move the decimal place one two three times and that's all you're done conversion made, simple. The crazy thing about Imperial isn't it it is actually based on the metric system it's defined by the metric system so if you want to know how long a yard is by definition it is 0.9144 metres and it didn't always used to be this way but this is now the case with the entire Imperial system. 

Now compare that to what the metric system is based on it's based on logical science. So, for example a meter in metric it is defined by how far light can travel in 3.34 nanoseconds, roughly. Now, that's something that will never change because the speed of light is always constant and in fact all of the entire metric system is based this way - based on fundamental laws of the universe whether it's for time or for distance now not something that won't change, unlike say I don't know the length of a king's foot it's a little more obvious. 

There are only three countries in the world that still use the imperial system and even America tried to switch to the metric system in 1975 with the Metric Conversion Act but it failed which is a real shame because of things like this.. 

This is the Mars Climate Orbiter, and in 1998 it cost 193 million dollars and it crashed into Mars because someone didn't do the conversion correctly between metric and imperial. Of course we use metric and science so this shouldn't have happened. Even worse a plane crashed because someone didn't put enough fuel in it because they thought that Imperial and metric didn't need any need to worry about the conversions on that and yeah people could have died but Air Canada still hasn't quite figured out that they shouldn't use the Imperial system because on Air Canada flights if you look at how far you will have to go before you get to your destination on that little monitor they still use miles and only miles which is infuriating to me. 

Now I'm not just upset about the Imperial system because it costs a lot so it does cost a lot no one knows exactly but it costs at least a few hundred million dollars a year to between all of the faulty conversions but mistakes and just the fact that in order to use it we still have to have everything listed in metric and everything listed in Imperial - and thats expensive. 

I'm not upset about the price though I'm upset about how it affects science now if you are trying to do a science experiment you have to do measurements. Science comes down to measuring the world and checking your assumptions or testing what your opinions are your hypothesis is so if you can't do a measurement and you can't do it accurately if you don't know what a meter is then how are you supposed to do science it's a pretty big problem.