Hi, I'm Kurtis Baute 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. Which 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. Now, what does this map show?
Well it has Liberia, Myanmar, and the US. 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 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 and if you agree and you like this video please
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