Imperial or metric?

alchemist

alchemist

Be pure. Be vigilant. Beware.
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Not, in fact, a question about the best type of stormtrooper, but the best type of measurement.

Hello, newbie here, so I thought I'd kick off with a question. My magnum opus is about a bunch of scientist types settling on a new planet in the late 21st/early 22nd century. I've been dithering on what units of measurement to use. If I'm lucky enough to be considered for publication, my likely biggest audience, the UK and US, tend to shun centimetres. However, for the purposes of story credibility, no self-respecting scientist would use imperial in 70 years time, right?

I can bypass this to an extent with statements like "He stood a head taller than her" and "He grasped the grapefruit-sized orb", but that doesn't always wash.

So far, I've used metric. Any thoughts, folks?
 
Whatever the Chinese use, would be my guess. :rolleyes:

And I really don't think UK readers would have any problem with metric.

Edit: you have a point, though, that the metre/centimetre are not as well scaled to describe body measurements as the foot and the inch, so I think "head taller" etc is a good idea where possible.
 
Britain is ahead of America with going metric, though we do still have a long way to go. Sooner the better as far as I am concerned. I think you will find most Brits have little problem with metric and would expect to find it in anything set more than say 50 years in the future.

Personally I'm with the Ace. If it's set in the future and has Imperial units I just groan. It's just not credible.
 
God I hate the imperial measuring system.

Metric is so much better for building. I don't know why the rest of the world hasn't already adopted it.

So yeah, metric all the way for SF, unless you're doing some sort of depressing post-apocalyptic future, in which case it was probably imperial's fault in the first place.
 
Either, but don't, for all the gods sake, give alternatives in the text, like a story I once tried to read that had in it passages like this:

He stood over 6'6" (2 meters) high, and his sword must have been 3'3" (1 meter) long. "Can you spare me a cooling pint (just over half a litre) of water, please?" he asked. "I've travelled forty miles (over 80 kilometers) today, and I don't think the temperature's dropped below 86°F (30°C) during that time."
Click to expand...

Seriously, I threw the book at the wall after about 28 (XVIII or 0b11100) pages...
 
When I was in university, (before these computer thingies became popular) we used to have conversion tables into FFFS units (furlongs, fortnights. Fahrenheit, stones). I knew engineers who would spout off the output of a turbine in hogsheads per fortnight. in case you wanted to sell one to a pig farmer, or give the dimensions of a chassis in cubits and spans.

But even in metric you have to choose between MKS and cgS – perhaps in space a different decimal of the basic units will prove more practical.

Oh, and for those who were brought up outside the UK, a stone is fourteen pounds, so eight stone = a hundredweight (cwt) which is 112 pounds, or a 50Kg sack of potatoes, close enough for rock and roll.
 
Thanks, everyone. Metric it will be. I said it to a friend recently and she suggested light years, which doesn't really work for describing the length of a motorbike.
 
Speed of light = 1,802,617,500,000 furlongs per fortnight (approx).

Good ol' Google...:p
 
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Metric. But imperial can be used for colloquialisms and not scientific measurements.

I live in Australia where we are thoroughly entrenched in the metric system yet when talking about someone's height in a non scientific matter its often imperial.

"He's at least six foot" being an example.

also

"It's miles away" rather then "It's kilometers away"

etc
 
Yeah but I think thats a generational thing, we changed over well within living memory, but as time goes on the younger ones will relate less and less to Imperial terms. I was taught Metric at school but had to understand a certain amount of Imperial in order to communicate with my parents, who grew up with imperial and never entirely converted. My nephews and nieces have less of a need to use or relate to Imperial - their world is metric, their parents are mostly metric with a smattering of imperial, so a smattering is all they need. What will their kids be like?
 
My book is set in 2082 and I'm savagely metric. I may have to back off a bit, as it can sound stilted at times.

Oh, and I have the UK now (finally!) using the Euro.

Ian
 
Metric has some advantages over "Imperial":

  • It's "universal". One litre is one litre. A pint is...? Well, it depends. A US pint is 473 millilitres, a UK pint 568. (As you'd expect, this affects the size of gallons.) Even within a single system, some measurements using the same name are not the same size. (Pyan has already mentioned the Stone.) Some are the same size, kind of: when used as a measure of volume, the bushel is fixed (US: 35.2391 liters**, Imperial: 36.3687 litres), but it can be used as a measurement of weight - or shold that be mass - in which case it varies with what's being measured.
  • Even in the UK, which has pints, miles, acres, etc., units used in science conform to SI (i.e. "metric"). Force is measured in Newtons, not pound-force, which sounds like some sort of discount business. (Aliens, of course, may not use Newtons, but their feet may be different as well. :))

** - Some folk just can't spell. ;):)
 
At the risk of going off topic (but then Alchemist seems to have made his decision now) I would like to take the opportunity to comment on the poor choice that is metric! Working in 16s or 12s is much more convenient except that we count in tens. That really is the only problem; it is just a little hard to imagine because counting in tens is so ingrained into us.

Imagine if we had had 12 fingers. We almost certainly would have ended up with a duodecimal numbering system something like:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 1A, 1B.

Where 10 is worth twelve in our current system.

So long as our entire numbering system was based on this it would have been at least as easy to use as decimal. Just as with decimal to multiply by twelve you would just add a 0 and so on.

However there are significant benefits to a duodecimal system. 10 can only be exactly divided once by 2 or 5. 12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4 or 6 and, apart from 6, it can then be further subdivided (I am ignoring dividng by 1 or itself). This is precisely why the clock is divided up into 12 not 10 hours.

There is actually a pretty strong argument that such a 12 based numbering system would be significantly better than our 10 based one.

Similar arguments can be made for 16 but that has the disadvantage that it can only be divided by even numbers. However we do have a very well established use of Hexadecimal in the computing world.
 
Didn't Alan Turing make a similar point about Britains pre decimal currency, how it was possible to split a restaurant bill between 6 people equally
 
I don't know about the actual quote but certainly that is the reason that base 12 has so often been used commercially for quantities and also base sixteen. It's not just that it can be evenly split amongst 6 dinners but also that it can be evenly split amongst 4, 3 or 2 diners. This is also why a foot was divided into 12 inches. However that gives no excuse for 20 shillings to a pound or 14 pounds to a stone; they have other origins :D.
 
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