The metric system sucks
in [Physics]
|
Prev: connecting Poincare-Luminet Dodecahedral Space with AP-reverse concavity #380 Correcting Math
Next: Hiding random?
From: Andrew Usher on 2 Feb 2010 17:54 I. Introduction LEFTIST POLITICS is one of the great errors of our age. [ By leftism I mean specifically the quasi-religious crusading ideology identified by Ted Kaczyncki (I always have trouble spelling that name!), and not (as he pointed out) any policies that happen to fall on the left-wing side (which I support myself when it comes to economic matters). ] Leftists attempt to insinuate themselves in every field in which they can, contaminating it with their poison. It is imperative, then, that they be stopped wherever this can be done without injury. One such place is the imposition of the metric system. All conversion to the metric system today, and not only that compelled by government, can safely be put under this head, as anyone that had good reasons to convert unrelated to ideology would have done so already. Besides this political argument, there are many inherent reasons to consider the metric system distasteful, especially when given universal application. It should be noted that arguments over current systems of measure have nothing to do with pseudohistorical speculation about ancient systems of measure. Any attempt by pro-metric advocates to link opposition to metrication with that ought to be dismissed, just as an attempt by pro- fluoridation sources to link opposition to it with claims of a communist conspiracy. The metric system for our purposes can be identified with the SI [ Note that SI is a French abbreviation, reminding everyone of the French nature of the idea ], for thee great crusade to impose metric did not truly gain momentum until the codification of the SI, and it has decreed within itself that it should replace all other metric units. Not only, then, the replacement of traditional [ i.e. English or Imperial ] units with those of the metric system, but often the replacement of older metric units, can be considered a target. II. Pro-metric bias As with other leftist causes, metrication (an ill-formed word; anyone with a decent education would write 'metrification' - I use it only because it is now standard) relies on the subversion of language. By language is meant not only the way we speak but also the way we think, as foretold by Orwell (This was one of the areas where Orwell really was far-sighted. It's no accident that his Oceania had adopted the metric system!), for our higher thinking is done in accordance with language. They manipulate our minds to believe silly things in favor of metric, when an accurate look would show otherwise. Let's take some examples. The first of all the metric lies is that we must adopt metric because it is the world standard. The costs of translation between languages, though, certainly exceed those of translation between measuring systems, should we then ask that everyone speak only English? Again, learning a new system of measure is much easier than learning a new language; for example, all halfway-educated Americans know metric, but comparatively few are fluent in any foreign language. It is surely not unreasonable to ask that people learn our system of measures when needed for communication; it is certainly much less an imposition than the need to learn English. And there is no more reason that we should necessarily adopt metric than that they should adopt our measures, when standardisation really is required, which is much less often than they would have you believe. The next is the concept that metric is somehow more scientific, or that scientific calculations can only properly be done in it. Of course, the people this message is targeted at are not scientists; they get an impression that the traditional units are always and only a waste of time, and that one must convert to metric before doing any serious calculation with them. No system (other than natural units) can be said to be more scientific than any other, and I shall have more to say about this below in sections IIX and IX. News stories related to mishaps surrounding unit conversion invariably get attributed by the media and influential sources to use of the traditional units, which is absurd. It could as easily be said that they are due to the metric system, for if English units were used consistently, they would be avoided. For a real example, just look at the Mars Climate Orbiter crash: if NASA has never moved toward metric conversion (which they had no need to do, and only started because of an amendment snuck into a 1988 Act of Congress), it could not have happened. Finally, and related to my first point, the cost of converting to metric is constantly minimised, and invariably said to pay for itself within a short time even though there is little evidence for it. But the reverse - that converting from the metric to the traditional units - is never examined at all, and surely if it did ever come up they would do the exact opposite. This shows that they are not truly interested in saving money or time at all, but only in promoting metric for its own sake. Further examples can be drawn from my Section V and exposure of one campaigner's fallacy. Finally, I should point out the classic book 'The Metric Fallacy' ( http://books.google.com/books?id=2AYKAAAAIAAJ&dq=pro-metric&source=gbs_navlinks_s ), possibly the most comprehensive investigation of how measures are really used. Everything in it remains true in principle today, and it shows that the pro-metric people were spewing the same nonsense then as now. III. Metric prefixes The system of prefixes is the unique character of the metric system, abstracted from the particular units used, and is what distinguishes it from all pre-metric proposals of a decimal system. This is often touted as an advantage of metric, but I think it is more usually a bad thing. How can that be? Above I compared the difficulty of learning measures with that of learning a language, and that is appropriate here also; for learning the differing words for the units in the traditional system - as inch, foot, mile or ounce, pound, ton - as not much more difficult than learning a similar number of new words in a language, or not very hard at all. In addition, the traditional names are shorter and can't be confused. More serious is the competition between prefixes and scientific notation. There is no question about the convenience of the exponential notation where large ranges of numbers must be used, or where values far out of ordinary experience occur in science. And before SI, physicists often used only scientific notation with the base units (i.e. CGS). However, now with SI, the metric bureaucrats and their mindset are pushing the universal applicability of SI prefixes, introducing absurdities like 'zepto' and 'yotta' and God knows what will follow them. This is insane: how can we expect people to keep straight so many prefixes? In contrast scientific notation is always unambiguous. IV. The SI 'base units' And now, for the most dramatic claim of them all: the SI derives every unit we need from _just seven base units_! Strange, and I thought the CGS system needed only three: why is seven any better? In fact only three are sufficient (four if you use the SI electrical units, see Section IIX), and the others redundant. The Kelvin is merely a unit of energy given by Boltzmann's 'constant', not a new base unit. The fact that temperature really is just energy on a microscopic scale is the most important concept in thermodynamics, yet our supposed perfect system of measures explicitly denies it! You will see, if you work out the formulae (actually you shouldn't have to if you're reasonably smart and have learned thermodynamics) that they all can be written with 'T' in place of 'kT', and work perfectly. The mole is not a unit at all, but a NUMBER - Avogadro's number. It's related to the 'unit' 1 by that number, a conversion factor. Calling it a separate base unit is as silly as saying the mile and inch are both base units of the English system! (Come to think of it, some metricists might, solely because their ratio isn't a power of 10 (as if there were anything inherently special about 10!).) The 'unit' 1, of course is one of mathematics, not physics, though there was a serious proposal to officially designated 1 an SI unit named the 'uno' - fortunately, the scientists had more sense than the French bureaucrats and shot that down. The candela is not a unit either. It's a response curve for the human eye, which by the way is known to be inaccurate. Calling that a physical unit is preposterous. If that's a base unit, then so is 'how bad something smells' and 'how musical a sound is'. The response curve of the eye is not not useful, of course, it's just not part of physics. V. Time and angle It is no doubt familiar that our customary units of time, which are nearly universal, involve factors of 60 and 24, and the units of angle, of which the degree at least is still universal, factors of 60 and 90/360. These are highly divisible numbers in the mathematical sense, and no doubt highly divisible numbers are preferable to those that are not, ex. 113 or 38, if all other things are equal. But according to the standards that the metric system acknowledges, all bases are not equal: the decimal system is preferred, and they do have a point, clearly. Indeed, the argument for decimalisation of time is certainly stronger than that for decimalisation of other common measures. We do freely mix hours and minutes, or minutes and seconds. Conversion between the units is very common, so much so that the most common values are embedded in the minds of everyone, such as 48 hours = 2 days. And yet, arguments about the inconvenience of conversion and mixing units are the most used for the superiority of the metric system, in spite of the fact that in most applications of length, weight, volume, etc. we have eliminated the necessity for conversion, while in applications of time they have not - and yet never mention it. This can't be honest. In angle, the smaller divisions are less used (or known), yet degrees are universal and seem to be understood by almost everybody. Still, one might question their use for the same reasons as for time; the divisibility by 3 of a right angle, while sometimes convenient, is really no stronger an argument for angle than for time or length, and a '30-60-90 triangle' would be better called a 'one-third [of a right angle] triangle' anyway. Decimal degrees are now widely used for the same reasons as other decimal measures; this would be fine if they were used exclusively, but astronomers continue to use decimal arcseconds as well, thus having two units of angle differing by 3600. I shouldn't even mention measuring right ascension in units of time, a completely unjustifiable practice which has no sense other than to make things more complicated: if the connection with time really were that important, we would measure terrestrial longitude that way also. Finally, the use of base-60 units smaller than the second, in both time and angle, disappeared after the introduction of decimals. If base 60 is a good idea, why should this be? In truth, the traditional units of time and angle deserve abolition a lot more than those of length and weight which have the advantages of being at a natural scale, and not creating substantially more calculational complexity in actual use. This is another irrationality of the metric idea. VI. A typical pro-metrication argument I will now take, as an example, one pro-metric site I have come across: http://www.metricationmatters.com/ and critique it. It is neither the best nor the worst pro-metric argument I have seen, and I think it may be taken as typical. Anti-metric arguments are not necessarily better, of course, and I have seen some pretty silly ones there, too. In this paper: http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/CommentaryOnWilkinsOfMeasure.pdf , he attempts, it seems, to show that the metric system was really conceived in England, and hence should not be considered particularly French. It should be remembered that even if this were true, it would be no argument in its favor. But I do not see it. Wilkins did propose something like a decimal system, but only as a small sidelight in his paper. Thus it should be seen in context, but he takes it out of context: if you consider that most of that work is presumably impractical (and would be agreed so by everyone), why is wanting to rationalise measures deserving of being singled out as insightful? Obviously, only because of what happened in the future; but no one can see the future. Anyway, the main difference between Wilkins's work (and others) and the metric system is that he had not used prefixes, which are the chief important change that metric actually did make. In this one: http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/CommentaryOnWilkinsOfMeasure.pdf , he makes many typical distortions, but due to its length I only focus on the very beginning. He again credits Wilkins with inventing the metric system, which is truly dishonest. Metric is thoroughly French, despite any claims to the contrary; indeed, we are even forced to use the French abbreviation SI, and he uses the French spelling 'metre'. The really laughable thing, though, comes on page 2, in the entry about the beginning of the universe. He gives the diameter of the observable universe as '285 yottametres', and says that before 'the metric system', scientists had difficulty referring to those numbers! Of course, no one in his right mind would say '285 yottameters' (leaving aside the question of whether that distance is meaningful at all), but 2.85e23 km (scientific notation) or 30 billion ly or 9.2 Gpc. I can't believe he is ignorant of this, but if he's not, he's lying. Now that I've started reviewing the papers there, let me quickly go through some others. This paper http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/CommentaryOnWilkinsOfMeasure.pdf is almost obscene in its claims that metrication is one of the most pressing issues that we face. Does he truly think the writers of those questions were ignorant of it? The fact is that units of measurement simply have no bearing on most issues, which do not care what units we use. The cost of conversion is much lower than he asserts, especially since it is largely automatic now. Worst, he claims that 'many, many' hospital errors are due to incorrect conversion, while admitting he doesn't know (and using a dishonest reference). There is, however, another type of error that happens only with metric: the confusion of one prefix for another. I KNOW that that happens with some regularity, from seeing several stories about fatalities from that cause. This one http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/USADecimalisationAndMetrication.pdf makes the point that we extensively use decimalisation with English units. Yes, because it has been found convenient. What's wrong with that? Nothing, except for people that think going metric is a goal in itself, some kind of crusade. This one http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/Is07042007TheFourthOfJuly.pdf is actually a pretty good idea - to use year-month-day whenever we write dates in all figures. I don't do so myself, but it does make sense and there is hardly any tradition behind the old ways anyway as dates haven't been written in all figures for very long. Many of his other articles (too many to enumerate) are devoted to showing how hard the English units are to use. As typical, these don't correspond to how people actually use the units, for they rarely mix or convert units and do not actively use all the archaic units he lists. I suppose I have now spent enough time on him, and have shown (and you can check it yourself) that his arguments are considerably fallacious and dishonest. VII. Practical electrical units The term 'practical' units in used in the sense it was in the 19c. - that is, the units used in common uses of electricity, not just in the laboratory or in theoretical discussions. These units are the volt, ampere, farad, watt, etc., and they are now part of the SI. Metric advocates say that these imply that we 'use metric' in all electrical work and even that it is inconsistent for anti-metric advocates to use any electrical devices because of their being 'in metric'. To the latter point I may first say that the English system, unlike the metric, does not pretend to be universal and meant to replace all other units in every field; nor do we say that the utility of any product has any relation to the units used to make it (Pro-metric people, on the other hand, have implied such!). The real history of electrical units shows that the situation is more complicated than that. The practical electrical units were decided long before there was an SI system, and the fact that the joule and watt (coincidentally) happened to fit into the MKS mechanical system was hardly noticed at the time, as almost all scientists then used CGS. But once the electrical units were established, they would be difficult to change and there was no really good reason for doing so. Also, the fact that it is sometimes convenient to use the same unit of power (Watts) for all uses, is no pro-metric argument given that until recently metric users used calories for their unit of heat, and of course it is the same difficulty to convert calories to joules as BTUs (or foot-pounds, etc.) to joules; in addition, we often measure time in units greater than a second and therefore factors of 60, 3600, etc. come into play no matter what. And of course, the electrical units actually confirm the anti-metric argument! The fact that units, once established in a particular field, can be suffered to endure in spite of being theoretically less than perfect (as they were and still are) is precisely the argument that has repeatedly been made against metrication, but metric advocates always reject it then, exposing their typically leftist double- standard. IIX. Electromagnetic units Now we discuss electrical units in a more theoretical context, such as is used in physics. It is well known among almost everyone in physics that SI units are unjustifiable and bad for any sort of theoretical calculation. Not only does it introduce the unnecessary 'constants' eps0 and mu0, which are even less justified than Boltzmann's 'constant' (which at least could be justified as a conversion between the macroscopic and microscopic views of temperature), but it introduces an unnatural and unnecessary fourth base unit to physics. It could be justified (I say) if that new base unit were the charge on the electron or something equally natural, but it is not; it is completely arbitrary. For parsimony the base electrical unit, if not natural, should be derived from mechanics, as scientists had always done in CGS units. The coherent system of CGS units, usually called Gaussian, has developed in common usage, and the sole justification for it is its close link with the three base mechanical units, not what those units actually are, so again it does not show any superiority of metric units over English or other by that fact. Actually, the modified Gaussian system, using the magnetic unit of current, is really superior for theory, given that Maxwell's equations take on their most symmetrical form in it; also, the unit of inductance becomes cm (which has always been used for calculation) rather than an impractically large unit, and that of resistance becomes dimensionless. The other obvious fact (shown by that unit of resistance which is, in SI terms, Z/4pi) is that SI units clearly put an improper factor of 4pi into the equations. They hide the perfect symmetry between the gravitational and electric force laws by forcing us to write 1/(4pi eps0) in the latter. By so doing, they hide the factor of 4pi where it should appear, and replace 2pi in certain magnetic equations with an inexplicable 1/2; the 4pi and 2pi are derived correctly by the integration over resp. a sphere or a circle. IX. Theoretical physics That last argument ought to be made more general. For theoretical physics is the algebra of physics; just as algebra generalises arithmetic, and in the calculation of algebraic formulae we avoid substituting particular numbers, and that that makes the utility of algebra; so it is with theoretical physics where results are derived by the manipulation of formulae without using any actual numbers, and again that is what makes it most useful. So with a system of units for use in any theory it is important that it be conceptually simple, and lacking arbitrary difficulties, and not that its quantities be of an ordinary scale, though that is beneficial where possible. Hence the popularity of various sorts of natural units in theoretical calculation, where otherwise undesirable conversion factors would be thrown in. But where no dimensionless quantities can be obtained, formulae can always be written without any conversion factor at all, as in classical mechanics where all quantities can be reduced to mass, length, and time so that all equations shall be satisfied equally by any set of fundamental units. If anyone says then, that modern physics is based on metric units, as many partisans would, they are in error; the equations of mechanics may be used with the system based on the meter, kilogram, and second, or the slug, foot, and second, or on _atomic units_; and I have used all three in my own calculations. The metric zealots, though, wish to impose SI units on everything, which has the results that many theoretical formulae have pointless complications that obscure the subject; these include not only the electromagnetic as discussed above, but the thermodynamic, for example. Every time I see thermodynamic relations written with 'kT' in place of the clear 'T' I feel sick, but it is necessitated by the SI unit of temperature, which is wrongly called fundamental. Likewise when considering matter at atomic or subatomic scales, it is clear that one should use a system of units that at least takes the elementary charge to be unity, while insisting on the SI is silly, but increasingly many do. And to make the most general, we may say in truth that different units are applicable to different purposes, that a diversity of units is not necessarily a bad thing, so long as a profusion of different values for the same unit (which has, with just a few exceptions, not existed in the English-speaking world for many centuries) be avoided. X. Conclusion The English units of measure are part of the English language, and indeed, of every European language once, even French. Most particularly, it is true of Latin, the language of our common heritage, and where we got our traditional units from. Perhaps if I had total power, I would move to abolishing the metric system everywhere, and establishing a non-metric basis for all science, simply to drive the nail in the coffin of the absurd dream of a universal, 'rational' system. But in the real world, it is not necessary to do so everywhere, in particular, the areas where metric was fully established by 1960 (which includes some, but not all, of the sciences) and areas where it is used for standardisation only and not to measure anything fungible. But there is no need to insist upon it; it only is highly desirable to use it where it has traditionally been, and where we naturally think in the traditional units. And it needs to be observed that the precise values of the English units are not critical, but only won by default out of the thousands of different standards that once existed in Europe. Andrew Usher
From: Yousuf Khan on 2 Feb 2010 18:18 Andrew Usher wrote: > I. Introduction <big snip> Wow, you didn't just write over 400 lines worth of anti-metric system rhetoric, did you? Only nutcases would do that. Get some help, will you? Yousuf Khan
From: Ken S. Tucker on 2 Feb 2010 18:58 On Feb 2, 2:54 pm, Andrew Usher <k_over_hb...(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > I. Introduction Agreed. It's the frogs, 1 Napolean penis weighs 1 gram, and has a length of 1 centimeter and climax's in 1 second, sounds scientific. Base 12 is vital in architecture, I need 16" centres on a 4'x8' ply, bingo, 16", that has no solution in a MeTric base 10 system. Ken .....
From: Andrew Usher on 2 Feb 2010 19:31 On Feb 2, 5:18 pm, Yousuf Khan <bbb...(a)spammenot.yahoo.com> wrote: > <big snip> > > Wow, you didn't just write over 400 lines worth of anti-metric system > rhetoric, did you? Only nutcases would do that. Get some help, will you? You can't be serious. Every one of those lines is quite rational. Andrew Usher
From: Heidi Graw on 2 Feb 2010 19:47
>"Ken S. Tucker" <dynamics(a)vianet.on.ca> wrote in message >news:732f921e-1220-42f9-bca3-a5a821dee69b(a)b10g2000yqa.googlegroups.com... > On Feb 2, 2:54 pm, Andrew Usher <k_over_hb...(a)yahoo.com> wrote: >> I. Introduction > > Agreed. > It's the frogs, 1 Napolean penis weighs 1 gram, and has a length > of 1 centimeter and climax's in 1 second, sounds scientific. > Base 12 is vital in architecture, I need 16" centres on a 4'x8' > ply, bingo, 16", that has no solution in a MeTric base 10 system. > Ken > .... ....and mechanics in Canada use two sets of tools, one for metric and one for non-metric. Car parts are now made all over the world and are combined into one vehicle. This means certain parts require metric tools and others not. It's a massively confusing thing to work on a globally manufactured vehicle. Btw, my own husband prefers the metric system. Heidi |