From the Editor Possibly the most controversial policy of this journal has been

our effort to keep the units and dimensions of our technical articles in the metric system. We have discussed this previously in our column and plan to devote several more columns to the pros and cons of the metric system, both with respect to its general, popular use and as it specifically affects optics.

The past year has seen several substantial steps toward the adoption of the metric system in the nonmetric parts of the world. One might say we are inching forward. The biggest changes are taking place in Great Britain, and are related to the efforts of that country to accommodate to the European Common Market. The primary motivation is not scientific, but rather economic. To prepare the British public for possible closer continental ties, the British Association for the Advancement of Science has various committees considering how the metric system can be systematically adopted. There is also a Royal Commission studying this. From time to time over the past year there have been articles in New Scientist describing their progress. Let us quote from one of these (New Scientist, 25 October 1962):

Supporters of the decimalization of coinage and similar modifications to British weights and measures will find some ammunition in the results of a Unesco survey on the educa­tional achievements of 13 year-olds in twelve countries. It shows that the arithmetical achievement of English school­children was significantly less than that of children from other European countries and attributes the disparity to the excessive use of fractions and outmoded units. . . .

The survey was a pilot scheme involving about 8000 children from twelve countries. It is hoped now to embark on a full-scale survey in these countries, which include Poland, Yugoslavia, Israel and the United States.

The British Government is now committed, up to a point, to decimalization of coinage. If, as one suspects it will, the full-scale Unesco survey confirms the poor impression of English schoolchildren's arithmetic, it is likely to be a blow to the entrenched supporters of fractions, pounds, shillings and pence and complicated systems of measurement. We seem, in fact, to be penalizing our children by holding them to an out-of-date system.

There are some who argue that the adoption of the metric system by Russia helped speed their production of scientists and engineers and their rapid advance from a relatively backward agricultural country prior to World War I to their present-day position as a leader in the Space Age. As late as 1925 most Russians walked a Russian mile, a wersta (1066.781 m), of 500 saschen. For shorter lengths they used a Russian yard, an arschin (0.7112 m), which could either be divided into 16 werschok

or 28 Russian inches. For area they had a choice of a square wersta (1.138 km2) or a dessätine of 2400 square saschen. For volume, a wedro (12.3 liter) of 10 kruschka or a tschetwert (209.9 liter) of 8 tschetwerik. And for mass, a pud (16.38 kg) of 40 funt. A funt (409.512 g), in turn, had 96 solotnik. Im­agine building a science with such construction materials. A present-day Russian who encounters these units in a literature class reacts to them the same way we react to the cubits, seahs, and talents of the Bible: we have not the vaguest notion how big they were.

From the Sumerians we acquired our sexagesimal system of time, and from the Romans our alphabet, but some historians assert the growth of science in these ancient civilizations was curbed because their mathematics for multiplication and division was so complex that few people progressed beyond addition, subtraction, and simple fractions. How many times does XIV go into MCMLX? (Ans., CXL.) A famous nuclear physicist, Edward Teller, recently wrote a book in which he argued that the adoption of the metric system would speed the training of scientists.

Your Editor cannot remember much of his early education, such as it was, but he has a hazy recollection that the fourth grade was mostly spent in converting inches to miles, ounces to gallons, and rods to acres. He has long since happily forgotten all this and has never used or needed any of these units. We hear much about our crowded schools and the cost of education. Why squander an entire year on useless and unnecessary con­versions that merely clutter up young formative minds and may actually impede the development of clear logical minds?

One of our readers suggests that different units (and different languages) make life more interesting, though they often give rise to irritation. Professor M. Czerny once remarked on this that surely those parts of our brains now occupied by conversion factors and vocabularies could be better used for other purposes. It seems to us that the world is so full of magnificent wonders, from the starry firmament on high to the twinkle in an eye, that there is no need to contrive complexity to make life more interest­ing. Poetry may require mysterious obscurity, but surely science does not.

JOHN N. HOWARD

R. W. Ditchburn Reading University and K. N. Ogle Mayo during the ICO Munich Meeting last year.

228 APPLIED OPTICS / Vol. 2, No. 3 / March 1963