[ RadSafe ] SI units, seen on a global scale

[Franz Schönhofer]

There has been recently a debate on RADSAFE (again) about the SI units, some
US hardliners stating that the US will never go to SI. I asked on RADSAFE
about the use of SI-units in India and in the far east. I have received one
message only – thank you Cheng. So I consulted Google and there I found a
link to Wikipedia. I usually do not rely much on Wikipedia, but the
information I found there seems to be quite reliable, especially the part on
the USA. Citations: „
 the worlds most widely used system of units, both in
everyday commerce and in science“, „
. Industrial use of SI is
increasing
..!,  and the most important citation: „With very few exceptions
the system is used in every country of the world.“ Wikipedia (SI) has a link
to the use of SI units in the USA and not only that I recognize the various
attempts of going metric I see from Wikipedia, that actually quite a lot of
measures are not only defined on metric terms, but actually used. I
recognize, that there the use of km instead of miles on the highway from
Tuscon to Nogales, which I was several times surprised to see, is mentioned.


 

Regarding radiation protection SI units I may mention that at the time of
the Chernobyl accident Austria still had not introduced officially the
SI-units and it was a terrible problem to convert and compare the
contamination with other European countries, all of which used SI-units
since long.

 

It is difficult for a scientist to understand, why the US is not following
more than 90% of the world population to introduce SI units. I am sure that
within the next 50 years the US will be completely „SI“ and the young people
will not know about miles, yards, rem, pCi, psi etc.

 

Best regards 

 

Franz

 

 

Franz Schoenhofer, PhD

MinRat i.R.

Habicherg. 31/7

A-1160 Wien/Vienna

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