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New Book Says The Meter Is all Wrong
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."
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....
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.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Mass: 1 atom of hydrogen What else would be required in this system?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
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.
...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=
what we need to do next is do away with the hour, minute, etc. As in Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky.
I know lots of things. Most of them are wrong.
You'ld think at least NASA would get this.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
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...
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.
mods metamodded as "Unfair"
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.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
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
You are all idiots, division being ugly is a product of our basis not our measurement system, change to base 12 and then most of what you say becomes true. To divide a kilometre by 3 you get 333 metres and then realise an exact answer is useless as we are dealing with a measurement which is by nature imprecise.
Of course I propose everything be done in terms of 60984. This number is divisible be everything under 12, and is the smallest one. Let's be honest who does any other sort of division.
The issue with metric is conversions are nice, so when I say there are 1,000,000 millimetres it doesn't take very long to work out that is 1 km. Now tell me how many inches in 10 miles and we'll talk.
With the current definition of length and time nobody would discover if the ligth speed is not a constant over time, since it is defined as a constant.
An arbitrary stick may avoid that problem.
I'd argue that standard units should have as little to do with nature as possible, to allow us to observe unexpected changes in nature.
Also whenever we are depending on nature, there should be multiple definitions, as an internal consitency check. (meter stick + ligth speed)
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.
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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!
IANAL but write like a drunk one.