It's more about "growing up with it" than anything else. It's not better, it's just what you know and have experience in. It's the same as they introduced the Euro here. It felt different and you needed to calc, how much the new stuff is worth in the old currency, to get a feeling.
If you would change everything to metric in the US today (that means all signs etc. Too), it would take maybe a week for all people to get it. Maybe a few weeks or 6 months to get the hang of it. After a year or two it doesnt matter at all anymore.
And I mean - the whole imperial system you use is actually based on the meter now anyway.
Canada has a bastard child of it, distance by vehicle it's metric height of a person Imperial weight of a person Imperial weight of a product Imperial or metric. It's literally something exactly you have to grow up with.
Right! This is why the rest of the world has gone to metric time!
Sorry bud, some non-metric measurements are simply more useful even in science. Light-year and Astrinomical Unit (distance from sun to earth) are better than Petameter and Gigameter.
Oh I don't think imperial is better, but sometimes the metric / celsius argument falls flat because people assume it's clarity and universality should be sublimely appealing, and I'm trying to explain why that isn't necessarily the case. I'm trying to pick open the American mind.
Don't worry, I didn't misunderstood. Just wanted to point out the experience part. Temperature makes sense if you are accustomed to the unit everyone around you uses.
Celsius has the more logical approach, while farenheit is something someone decided at one point. But still, the main "issue" is what you have being taught and use all day.
As I said, it would take the US a bit to get a feeling for it, but after a short time, most could relate with the new units :)
To me there are pretty big differences between temperatures that aren't really conveyed by celcius numbers. Going from 76 to 72 in my house makes me noticeably colder and less comfortable. But that's just going roughly from 24 to 22 in celsius. It doesn't seem precise enough.
Fahrenheit wasn't as arbitrary as you think. Zero was the coldest temperature he could produce using a salt water bath, 96 was human body temperature (scale has since changed), and it was supposed to be based on 12, like feet to inches. Fahrenheit wasn't just some idiot, he was a skilled instrument maker.
It really depends on what you're doing and the history of what you're doing, cuz some stuff is just Imperial or metric because that's what everyone's used to. Canada has a mishmash of both.
Standards matter. Some standards are better but it would cost countless billions to change from imperial to metric. Think about it deep and long on why it would be expensive.
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u/b4k4ni 7h ago
It's more about "growing up with it" than anything else. It's not better, it's just what you know and have experience in. It's the same as they introduced the Euro here. It felt different and you needed to calc, how much the new stuff is worth in the old currency, to get a feeling.
If you would change everything to metric in the US today (that means all signs etc. Too), it would take maybe a week for all people to get it. Maybe a few weeks or 6 months to get the hang of it. After a year or two it doesnt matter at all anymore.
And I mean - the whole imperial system you use is actually based on the meter now anyway.