Back in the Sixties, when I was in high school, all of my science teachers presented the metric system as the only rational approach to purging the world of the cluttered patois known as avoirdupois. "How," they would snicker, "do you go about converting gills to teaspoons?"
Later, it not only seemed rational, but inevitable, and even natural. Cigarettes were a silly 101 millimeters. Drugs were sold in milligrams, and grams, and "ki's." Photographs taken with a 35 millimeter camera and movies taken with 8 millimeter forever recorded--or recorded forever--my inept progress from 150 centimeter skiis to ones of 170 centimeters. Once, I found both the 19 millimeter and the 3/4 socket missing from my wrench set. Every electric appliance or electronic gadget in my home rated itself in watts, and amperes, and volts, and always had. I nodded in sage agreement when the United States Metric Resolution was passed.
Yet, I didn't proselytize about it. Those who didn't accept it weren't acquaintences of mine. Besides, I figured, recent advances in computer literacy would probably be followed by a scientific literacy, and the general community would soon leap, not crawl, into the metric world. I had grown up with it, and so, in a sense, would they. I was confident.
So what happened? Why did it bother me so much when I looked at the speedometer of my car and it was marked off in kilometers per hour? Have you ever even heard of a kilosecond? And what's a metric ton? What's the metric equivalent of a 90 degree angle? Or 60, or 45 degrees? Weren't "calories" and "liters" metric terms once; why aren't they now?
The nagging, embarrassing questions don't end. Do we really want to use a system that was first proposed in 1670 and only received a hasty update 200 years ago by a revolutionary committee working without knowledge of organic chemistry or relativity or aerodynamics? Some intelligent people do not. In 1975, 22 physicists at the University of Colorado signed a petition urging caution. They thought that surely a third and better alternative could be developed before the metric system embedded itself inextricably in the societies of the entire world. Will we have to go through all this again in another 2 or 3 hundred years?
While I concede that it is impossible to solve every problem, we probably should try to clean up a few things now, and I would like to offer one suggestion. Let's get rid of our number system. Regardless of the number of appendages at the ends of our mitts, base 10 is unnatural. Did you ever divide a pie into five pieces? Or ten? Ergonomists explain that humans tend to section things into halves, thirds, or quarters, but rarely fifths. Consequently, base 10 just doesn't hold up.
There have been previous attempts to use base 10, which have failed. A mile used to be a milia passuum, a thousand paces. Nobody thinks of a mile as a metric unit anymore. At one point, the Romans had 10 months in a year; now there's a dozen. There is something inherently clumsy about base 10.
What do we do if we toss it out? There is a perfect choice for the replacement for base 10. It is the number system, besides decimal, that is used most widely. Wrong, computer jocks, it is not binary. Nor is it hexidecimal, nor octal. It is base 60, otherwise known as sexigesimal. (Sort of sounds better than "decimal," doesn't it?) With minor modifications, we might even be able to salvage a lot of the old measure units and their relationships.
An immediate objection might be raised that we would have to invent 50 more digits. I admit that would be tough to do indeed, considering that we can't now tell our "ohs" from our "zeroes." However, there is an amazingly simple solution: we can do it just like the ancient Babylonians. They used a base 10 system and 10 digits to represent the base 60 "digits." Like we do today with our sexigesimal degrees, minutes, and seconds. And like we do today with hours, minutes, and seconds.
See, we're part of the way there already.