Decimals Beggar The Imagination

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29892, 4 August 1962, Page 8

Decimals Beggar The Imagination

[From the British Broadcasting Corporation)

LONDON. PROPOSALS that Britain should change to a deci mal currency and in general move towards the metric system of measurement have been greeted by many as a rational, “commonsense” step. But this assumption has not gone unchallenged. In a talk broadcast in the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Third Programme, A. C. Aitken, Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh University and himself a "lighting calculator,” made a powerful plea for the duodecimal system, in which 12, not 10, is the key number. In a talk broadcast in the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Home Service, lan Rodger took a more emotional view —deliberately, he said, “for figures are not as unemotional as, you might think. “It sterns to me,” said Rodger, “that the changes are going to affect much more than our trade, our engineering, and our sciences. They are going to affect our imagination as well.” For instance, the references in an enormous body of literary work would become quite meaningless. “What will that ’then thousand miles’ in Burns’s poem, ‘My Love is like a Red. Red Rose’ mean to people reared on kilometres? There will be footnotes, of course, but the joy of many things will be destroyed. It will be impossible to explain the magic in the nursery rhyme ‘Four-and-twenty Blackbirds’ when two dozen has no significance. The carol 'I Saw Three Ships A-sailing’ will not mean the same thing when the mind sees Three as a recurring number.”

In fact, lan Rodger deplored particularly the horrible fate awaiting the numeral Three in the decimal system. “At the moment,’’ he said, “it has a unity about it; it’s got a sure and certain place in our imagination. . . .

But in the decimal system Three becomes a figure of fun. A-third wanders away to infinity dragging its Threes behind that decimal point.” Quite apart from the practical uses of multiples of three, there was the fact that Three was a number possessed of magic. “While the rest of the world struggles with decimals to divide the numeral, we with our system accept its glorious indivisibility. And that gives us a special view of the meaning of phrases like ‘Third time lucky,' ‘three magpies,’ the ‘nine lives of a cat,’ and the multiples of seven which give us success at pontoon (poker) with twenty-one.’’ The decimal system would destroy the numeral’s mystic image. Furthermore, Rodger said, he believed that the change would mean a “divorce in imagination” affecting not only literature but the very look of Britain's landscape and towns. Though some British engineers and architects were already thinking in metres, their subconscious was still dominated by older units of measurement, and thus the buildings they put up today bore a proportional relationship to others built years ago. But if the metre, and not the foot, became the basic unit, there would be "metre” houses beside “foot” roads, with odd effects on the proportions of the streets. He was sure that spatially a French road, for example, in relation to the buildings along it looked different proportionately from an English road.

Recalling that the decimal system had been initiated by the French in a burst of irrational fervour at the time of the Revolution that was to sweep away all legacies of the past, lan Rodger said that recently some mathematicians had raised the nagging thought that one day the world would go back to the duodecimal system as being more rational. “The account■>nts may say what they like, but the dozen has a certain formal beauty. It’s been with us since Babylon and it seems a pity that we’re going to lose it along with some manyother delightful inconsistencies.’’—From a talk in the Broadcasting Corporation’s Home Service.