Pat:
Those must have been better days or you were lucky to have enlightened
professors. I graduated in 1970 and no (graduate) course I took in Mech. Eng'g
had SI (or mksA) units in lecture or homework. Perhaps the names of prof's like
Den Hartog, Rohsenow, Rogowski may "ring the bell." My son spent a decade at
MIT and most of his courses were in SI but also included I-P. The machine shop
work for undergraduates was all I-P. The drawings for the underwater
exploration equipment he had been working on later were all in I-P. I recall
the story of one student who designed a section of some equipment in metric for
the sole purpose of obtaining metric tools at the Institute expense that he
could use for working on this European car.
On the other hand, prof. French of MIT has been an ardent promoter of SI,
serving on committees. He eventually got bored with the slow progress. No other
staff from MIT has been a promoter to my knowledge.
Stan
----- Original Message -----
From: Pat Naughtin
To: U.S. Metric Association
Sent: 09 Mar 28, Saturday 15:44
Subject: [USMA:44161] Re: smoots
On 2009/03/28, at 10:44 PM, John M. Steele wrote:
I graduated from MIT a few years after Smoot. All of my courses were
taught exclusively in SI, called rationalized mksa at the time. When a rare
Customary units homework problem was thrown in the mix, the expected solution
(required for full credit) was to convert to metric, solve, convert the answer
back to Customary if the problem demanded.
Dear John,
This looks a lot like you are describing the approach taken by the Mars
Climate Orbiter teams at NASA in 1999. This is true except for the bit where
you say, 'convert the answer back to Customary'. Go to
http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/news/mco991110.html where they say 'The
'root cause' of the loss of the spacecraft was the failed translation of
English units into metric units …'
However, please note that in reporting this, I am not in any way suggesting
that NASA should change to smoots for interplanetary navigation.
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
PO Box 305 Belmont 3216,
Geelong, Australia
Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
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