Hi, I'm Curtis Bodie 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 a third of a cup. And we were pretty educated, pretty intelligent people that at one point learned to use the imperial system but we couldn't figure it out because it's 5.33 tablespoons and well, you can't measure a third of a tablespoon. We were trying to use tablespoons so you didn't have to measure a third of a cup. And it turns out that you're supposed to use 5 tablespoons and 1 teaspoon. Which is a lot like saying if you wanted to know the volume of a watermelon, that's the same as 5 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 tips is 1 point and 6 points is a line. 12 lines is an inch and 12 inches is obviously a foot and 3 feet, make up 1 yard and 1,760 yards make up a mile. Which is absolutely different than a nautical mile or a Roman mile. And if your head is spinning so is 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 kilo liter. You have to move the decimal place 1, 2, 3 times. And that's all. You're done. Conversion made simple. And the crazy thing about imperial is that 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 meters. And it didn't always used to be this way, but this is now the case for 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 3.3, or 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. It's based on fundamental laws of the universe, whether it's for time or for distance. Now that's something that won't change unlike, say, I don't know, the length of a king's foot. It's a little more obvious. Now what does this map show? Well it has Liberia, Myanmar, and the USA. These are the three countries in the world, the only three 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, and it crashed into Mars because someone didn't do the conversion correctly between metric and imperial. And of course, we use metric in science, so this shouldn't happen. Even worse, a plane crashed because someone didn't put enough fuel in it because they thought that imperial and metric didn't need anything 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 have to go before you get to your destination and that little monitor, they still use miles and only miles, which is infuriating to me. So, I'm not just upset about the imperial system because it costs a lot, though it does cost a lot. No one knows exactly, but it cost at least a few hundred million dollars a year. To between all of the faulty conversions, the 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 that's 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. This 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. And if you agree and you like this video, please like this video. And if you didn't like this video, please dislike this video and give me some feedback. I'd love to hear from you. And you can click here to subscribe if you like, and thank you for watching.