When is the United States going to move completely to the metric system? You know, meters instead of yards or feet, kilograms instead of pounds, grams instead of ounces, liters instead of quarts or gallons, Celsius instead of Fahrenheit. (I’m used to “centigrade” rather than Celsius, but those two are the same thing.) Ninety-five percent of the world is on the metric system. It’s time we made the change whole-heartedly and completely and not be content with an old, outdated system mixed with the metric system.
The United States passed the Metric Conversion Act in 1975, and made the metric system the preferred system of weights and measures for all United States trade and commerce. But much of the change over is voluntary, and the old system is still used in a lot of places. Our road signs are still in miles and miles per hour in most places, except for a few roads down near the Mexico border. There is no deadline for the changeover and that’s what we need.
As a scientist, I used the metric system completely and entirely in my work. I measured volumes in milliliters and microliters (one microliter is a very tiny amount of liquid, by the way). I measured weight in grams, milligrams, micrograms, nanograms and even femtograms. I measured temperature in centigrade. If I went to the doctor, they took my temperature in centigrade (normal human body temperature is around 37° C). They took my weight in kilograms.
Many parts of the US government have already made the change. NASA now insists that its spaceships be built to metric specifications. But the impetus to change to the metric system has not reached the rest of the country, except in small ways. If you pick up a jar of jam, say, in the grocery store, it will be labeled in ounces and in grams. But if you weigh onions on the scale in the produce section, you still weigh in ounces. There is no current impetus to going over to the metric system. I wonder why that is.
One reason for resistance has not so much to do with the metric system itself, as with the complicated math that has to be done to convert from one to another. The two systems have nothing in common, and conversion requires knowing, or being able to look up, factors that are not whole numbers. For example, one inch equals 2.54 (+ an infinite number of digits) in centimeters. A lot of people, I suspect, are turned off by those obtuse factors. Another reason is the general inertia that settles itself in any changeover. “We’ve always used feet and inches. Why should we change?” Or, “Look at all those plans and blueprints. All those will have to be changed.” (No, they won’t.)
Another reason for resistance has to do with the weird numbers that come up when making a change. For example, we most often build houses with eight-foot ceilings. That’s 96 inches, and that translates to 243.84 centimeters. Who’s going to make a ceiling at that level, or with that level of accuracy? The simple answer is to make ceilings at 250.00 centimeters. Or 240 cm., or some other round number.
So, why change at all? The best argument I can give is that most of the rest of the world uses the metric system, and we should join them. It’s important that we all speak the same language, so to speak. It’s important to join them and not look like a petulant little boy off on his own. “It’s my system, and if you don’t let me play, I’m going to take my system and go home.”
Another reason for change is that the metric system is conceptually easier to understand than the current system since it is based on 10, or multiples of 10. One centimeter is 10 millimeters. One meter is 100 centimeters. One kilometer is 1000 meters. And so on. This means that multiplying in the metric system can be as simple as moving the decimal point. In the US system, one mile is 5280 feet. Why “5280?” What the hell is 5280? Where did that come from? If you want to know how many feet in 13 miles, for example, get out your calculator. One foot is 12 inches, but a yard is only 3 feet. One pint is 2 cups, but a gallon is 4 quarts. It’s ridiculous and unrealistic and unnecessary to have to remember all those multiplication factors when we have a perfectly good, sound, and logical system that we can put into place immediately. The sooner the better.