[jbay808]

Why should there be any separation between science and daily life?

Think about it not for the benefit of the current generation who would be forced to burden the switch, but for the next generation who could reap the benefits.

I think one issue is that by growing up with US units and then using a second system for science and engineering, it can make American students studying those topics feel like they are in an unfamiliar territory and interfere with their intuition. Most will eventually overcome this through practice and become fluent in both systems, but it's still a barrier. Science becomes a Special Discipline requiring Special Language different than what your family uses at home. Like if all science were still done in French or Latin, and you needed to study those to read a paper.

Until you have met people who grew up abroad measuring their height in cm and their weight in kg, preparing food from recipes listing ingredients in grams and mL, to whom those units are completely natural for daily life and are also the same ones they use at work when designing machines and filling test tubes, it's easy to feel that US units simply "are" the units suitable for daily life, as though that were a universal truth and not just a local cultural oddity.

Not to mention the massive net costs of having suppliers worldwide making extra sets of almost identically sized components that nonetheless aren't interoperable. Screws with 3 mm and 3.175 mm diameter, etc.

[ward]

> Science becomes a Special Discipline requiring Special Language different than what your family uses at home. Like if all science were still done in French or Latin, and you needed to study those to read a paper.

You realize this is still a problem for most of the world and needing to learn English, right? :P I'm hoping we can solve this in my lifetime with everyone knowing one standard language through education as a child, but as it stands the struggle is real for many of my fellow non native English speakers.

That said I agree with you, all these differences are a pain and I'm confronted with them way too often in my daily life.

[umanwizard]

> I'm hoping we can solve this in my lifetime with everyone knowing one standard language through education as a child

It seems like this is rapidly becoming the case in the Western world, and that that language is English.

[jbay808]

Absolutely! America is very lucky to have come out on the right side of that lottery. But then it unnecessarily goes and handicaps itself by making measurements into a foreign language.