Introduction to the Metric System + Bill Nye
Science
Overview of the Metric System
How far is it from here to here? How much does the television set you're watching away? And how many years old are you? See, we measure things all the time. That's how we compare one thing to another. Measuring things is how we understand the world and especially how we understand our place on it. Measuring things allows us to figure out how long it takes to get from one place to another. If we didn't measure things, everything we build would fall right down. The better we measure, the better things fit. Humans are about this big. So we've always wanted a unit of measurement about this law. And we want it to be the same for everyone. We want it to be a standard. That's why it's hard to use something like a foot because not everybody has the same size feet.
So what we did is we looked at the earth and we divided the distance from the North Pole to the equator in tens. 10 million times. And we got this. It's a meter. We use tens because humans have ten fingers. Now you can keep going. You can divide a meter by ten. And ten again, and you get centimeters. There are a hundred centimeters in a meter, just like there are a hundred cents in a dollar. You can divide it by a thousand and you get millimeters by a million and you get micrometers. It's easy with a meter, you can measure just about anything. This microphone is about 32 centimeters long. What? It's the metric system. It's easy. What? I said it's easy. What?