NASA goes Metric

Brian writes...Hey Jim, so NASA recently decided to go metric. What do you think about this? Are units such as AU, parsec, and light-year considered metric or English?

I’m surprised to hear that NASA is going metric. I thought they had been for years. It’s about time that NASA and the rest of this country did it. Back in the ‘70s. the US had been legislated to go to the metric system over a 10 year period of time but it all fell through. The only business that went metric was the liquor industry that changed bottles from 1/5 gallons to 750 mls. That gave them the ability to give us less product for the same price. I never did understand the problem. If we went to the metric system overnight, where every place of business had to make all measurements meters, it would take us about 3 months for it all to sink in.

The metric system is such a much better system that it just does not make any sense to stick with the English system. Take for instance the millimeter. It can easily be measured and read with a metric rule where as a sixteenth of and inch, which is larger, therefore less accurate is cumbersome and unwieldy. Construction workers use measurements all day every day, but few use sixteenths. In trades where they have to be accurate to a sixteenth you will hear people to refer to “heavy” and “light” measurements. That is to say a “heavy half inch” is actually nine sixteenths inch. A “light three quarter inch” is actually eleven sixteenths.

The one exception to this is the metric measurement of temperature. One degree of Celsius is 1.8 degrees of Fahrenheit. Almost half as accurate. The temperature of water freezing and boiling are still arbitrary points on a scale. Two degrees is not twice as hot as one degree. One hundred degrees is not twice as hot as fifty degrees. Celsius was and is a bad idea. Do something that make sense and is practical like meters and then have everyone change to the third system.

As far as the AU, parsec or light-year, all three are unit neutral, they can be expressed in either metric or English measurements.