I'll not repeat myself except to say that the imperial system is a reflection of the natural world which divides itself into twos, fours, eights, twelves, etc, the products of small prime numbers, NEVER into powers of ten so our feeble brains can calculate easily.
Trying to stuff the round world into the square metric hole is just plain silly. Even the metric people are sensible enough to measure boat speed in knots, an imperial measurement in spite of the whitewashing that has occurred.
Yes, it is possible to measure the universe in metric units. Yes, those inappropriate units act as a smokescreen, keeping us from understanding the underlying processes working in products of small prime numbers.
Units are sort of like translating one language into another. If I were translating "Well, that's quite another kettle of fish" into German, I would have two choices: one, to translate the words and leave the German reader entirely clueless about what I said, and two, to translate the idea into the equivalent of "that is another idea entirely" and lose all sense of the underlying language and figure of speech. You can't have it both ways, and perhaps you are best served by having both renditions.
|