quick! the Imperial system is under attack. Only you can save it. Tell me, how many barleycorns in a chain?
Wait until you discover what system they used for the Apollo missions
I’m waiting
Internal calculations were are all done in metric, but converted to traditional US units because many of the astronauts were pilots and more used to them
imperial system is based on metric(on wikipedia) so they calculed on metric, converted to imperial, that is basically metric but worse
Kinda sorta not really.
One problem with units is defining them precisely.
For example, a meter is ostensibly “one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle”. That’s not exactly precisely defined because the earth isn’t a perfect sphere.
So currently, a meter is defined to be the distance light travels in a vacuum in 9192631770 / 299,792,458 hyperfine structure transitions of caesium-133.
Rather than doing the same sort of thing with updating the standard definition of a foot or pound, the US just piggybacked off the work precisely defining metric units and defined imperial in terms of metric.
So now a foot is officially the precise distance light travels in some number of hyperfine structure transitions of caesium-133, and the US government didn’t need to do a thing.
Someone once told me it was 20 degrees Celsius out. I didn’t know if it was snowing, blazing, or if he was moving at 50 furlongs a minute.
This is exactly how I feel when my American colleagues discuss the weather in Fahrenheit.
