And to mix things up, some units (even base units) have two or three letter symbols. Some of the units are named after people, some are not, so some of them have capital letter as symbol, others a lower-case. Now if we are sticking to the "main" prefixes, we don't have anything between mm³ (which is tiny amount) and m³ (which is large amount).įrom a purely notational perspective, it would have been nice to have bit more consistency with the naming and symbols of the units and prefixes. At least personally I think it would be more convenient (if maybe not as elegant) that mm³ would be 10^-3 cubic meters instead of the current 10^-9 cubic meters. It might have been a good idea to retain those specialized units, because of the ambiguity problems of prefixed sq/cu meters. Except of course people didn't follow and I think in pretty much every metric country at least liters are still in common use. Originally metric system had a(c)res and liters, but then they noticed that they are not that great and switched to square and cubic meters. Oh, and mentioning liters gets us to the confusing world of area and volume units. That is something I would have liked to have from day 1 so that we wouldn't have a cacophony of centimeters and deciliters in common use. These days metric system is associated mostly with 10^(n*3) prefixes, but that is relatively new feature. Admittedly basing time on earth rotation lacks certain degree of universality that other base units have, so maybe altogether different base would have been a good idea. I would had preferred to have the time base unit to be (roughly) 1/1000th of a day rather than 1/86400th of day. While everything else in metric system is mostly nicely aligned with decimal system, the attempt to reform time failed, so we are stuck there with the legacy unit(s).
In addition to the fact that it is defined via an artifact, it also is the only base unit with a prefix, mostly by accident. Then there is of course the big kilogram debacle that we are still trying to figure out. I can appreciate that nature might not allow aligning all the units in a perfectly harmoniuous matter, but surely we can do better than this. The (current) defintions involve such nice round numbers like 299792458, 9192631770, 273.16, and so on. The most obvious problem is the definitions and "values" of the base units. But that would probably been too big of a change to get actually implemented (especially globally) even during the tumults of french revolution, so that is not really my main gripe with metric system. Base 12 is nice and I would prefer it over base 10.
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