Napoleon was apolitical?

The Metric system was invented by the French post-revolution in an attempt to standardize measurements without the yoke of a pesky monarchy. But wait, there was already a system to standardize measurements, the British Imperial system. But monarchy bad so F the already-existing standard system.

So no, it was no apolitical. Napoleon sought to impose it by force through conquest, mostly to spite the British under a guise of "it just makes more sense as a decimal system"

The defining of SI units by physical constants came way after the Metric system invention

This post was edited by El1te on Mar 7 2025 05:04pm

You do realize that the system of time uses the ancient Sumerian system? Degrees, minutes, seconds, base 60.

The French actually tried to implement a metric time system (decimal system) and it failed spectacularly.

If you're a true metric supremacist, why not use metric time?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time

This post was edited by El1te on Mar 7 2025 05:08pm

“The metre was originally defined in 1791 by the French National Assembly as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle”

“Following Royal Society investigations by John Playfair, William Hyde Wollaston and John Warner in 1814 a committee of parliament proposed defining the standard yard based upon the length of a seconds pendulum. This idea was examined but not approved”

Of course, it’s a common knowledge. What’s good about time measure is that everybody uses the same. And the second is an SI unit and we all like it

Earth's planetary distances were not accurately known at the time, thus they were standardized based on a flawed assumption, which is even worse than not standardizing at all.

The kilogram was based on absolutely nothing (a hunk of corrosion-resistant metal) until very recently.

Like I said, it was just a pretense to spite the British because they were jealous

Well, the second comes from the dawn of civilization, SI just appropriated it. And the SI system came a long while after the dawn of the metric system.

So of course everyone loves the second, it's the tried and true. Now only recently with modern science (post-Einstein papers) was the second actually defined to a physical constant. Then only after that definition could the meter be defined to another physical constant, c. All this stuff came over 100 years after the French

Don’t try so hard. If you like your feet, you can keep your feet. As long as you know how to convert them back to SI

Of course.

The problem actually lies in the conversion. The conversion factor isn't 100% accurate thus it's a problem for ultra-precision engineering.

This is why Europe still hasn't made it to space. They don't have the powerful and robust engineering network standardized to Imperial like America has.

Now, if Europe developed their own space program they could absolutely standardize to metric. The point to take note of here is that if you took an American spaceship (using all Imperial measurements for parts, body etc.), converted all the dimensions to metric with infinite numeric precision, the spaceship will still fall apart on launch. Why? The conversions aren't perfectly accurate. My NASA JPL professor taught me this, I'll always remember it

This post was edited by El1te on Mar 7 2025 05:31pm

I am sure that when Elon was designing his rockets from scratch, he was thanking God he’s in America because one thing he couldn’t have handled were SI units

He could only do so in America because America has an extremely robust and old (since the genesis of America) engineering network standardized to Imperial units.

The standardization is the only thing that matters when it comes to building stuff that works. The units don't matter.

Europe doesn't have its own robust standardized engineering network. It could have if Napolean won, and it could have if Hitler won, but alas losing wars has consequences. As a result, Europeans are fops who are just simply not good at building things. Every builder moves to America to get stuff done since it's enabled by both this robust standardized network as well as a can-do pioneer culture.

The Germans are still good at building some things like scientific instruments, which they do have a strong network for. But not a whole lot else. Germans aren't even that good at building cars anymore