| Summary: | the United Kingdom about "going metric", or with "metrication". In 1965, in reply to a Parlia-mentary Question, the President of the Board of Trade stated that "the Government consider it desirable that British industries on a broaden-ing front should adopt metric units, sector by sector, until that system can become in time the primary system of weights and measures for the country as a whole". The system which is to be adopted is the SI system of units. SI stands for Systeme Internationale d'Unites (International System of Units). The adoption of this set of units will have widespread repercussions in the scientific literature, also amongst makers of scientific apparatus. Already it has impinged upon lecture courses given in various centres for the new syllabus of the Primary FFARCS examina-tion. The overthrow of various traditional units is bound to produce some complications, and this is particularly true, as far as medicine is con-cerned, in the case of pressures. Physics is tradi-tionally a subject concerned with measurement and has long been associated with anaesthesia. Hence the author felt that at this time a dis-cussion concerning SI units would not be out of place, and would stimulate anaesthetists to think in terms of the new units. The history of units. The idea of a decimal system of units was conceived by Simon Stevin (1548-1620) who also developed the concept of decimal fractions. Following the French revolution, the statesman Talleyrand, advised by contemporary scientists, aimed at the establishment of an international decimal system of weights and measures "a tous les temps, a tous les peuples". It was based upon the metre as the unit of length (intended to be one ten-millionth part of the distance from the North Pole to the equator at sea-level through Paris) and the gramme as the quantity of matter (the mass of 1 cm3 of water at 0°C). In 1837, the British Association for the Advancement of Science chose the centimetre and gramme as basic units of length and mass for scientific pur-poses. The ...
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