You should check out geck skin. It's also biomimicry but it's based on the relationship between skin and tendons as opposed to skin texture. I honestly don't fully understand it, but it doesn't require microscopic features which should make it easier to produce.
I had my equivalent of a Disney moment in my garden a few weeks ago when a gecko landed on the back of my hand. Having the real thing walk across my skin was remarkable. I swear that I could feel the pads of its feet moulding to the profile of my skin and this video kind of confirms that experience. (Beautiful little shimmering speckled beasty!) I let it down gently onto a tussock grass and it went on its way. Biomimetics has much to teach us.
I remember people telling me gecko tape would NEVER be possible, even the guy inventing this tape says so, but he still persisted and they developed something that comes pretty close to it. This is amazing! Another dream come true
Wow i remember when i was younger, my family didn't have cable so i was stuck watching local TV. One of my favorite shows was on PBS kids called Wild Kratts. These 2 guys taught you all about animals but one of my favorites was the Gecko. The guys in this show had Gecko-inspired suits which i always wanted to be real. This is really making my childhood dreams come true
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Pop quiz: Do polar N2O and nonpolar CO2 liquids mix under a pressure chamber even though they have similar densities? If not, what would happen when you tried to make both liquids supercritical in the same chamber? If one were to be very rich and irradiate one of the molecules, N2O, with neutrons, would the density of enriched N2O be greater than normal CO2? Just a few thoughts.
Thanks so much to Derek and team for visiting our lab! This was a great video on our gecko-inspired adhesives, and the best explanation yet of Van der Waals forces.
Those are some super rad materials you’ve got there! I can’t wait to see what the future has to offer! Edit: here is an idea. Wouldn’t it be great to know that the gecko material is locked in place? Like, you showed with laser lights where the material had made contact with the glass/plexiglass. You were able to verify, “hey, I’ve got good contact.” Wouldn’t it be ideal to be able to sense and/or see that you’ve got good contact? I’m thinking of the building climber climbing the windows. Windows get dirty. With every placement of the material and removal, it’s going to pick up some dust and debris. If the climber could see that he has good contact, somehow, he could have more trust in his/her movements and be capable of moving faster. Unsolicited advice without a hypothesis as to how to get it done. Srry bout that. I guess that’s why your the engineer and I’m the consumer, lol… If possible, I would like a 2.4% royalty on all income, after expenses and taxes of sales using my idea. Find me on Facebook. I’m in Oklahoma and I’m hard to miss. Royalties or “cash for idea.” Meaning, if you’d rather just pay me up front, I can be bought out for $1,000,000.00. Offer good for thirty days from todays date. February 5th, 2023.
this is absolutely amazing! a professor of inorganic chemistry i had in college used geckos to explain van de waals forces. He went on saying that geckos used the induced dipoles to attach themselves to walls, but weak as those forces are, they were not enough to make a new substance, or else we would end up with some "wall geckoate" (free translation) everytime a gecko climbs something
Man. This seems so cool and awesome. I can think of actual practical applications this might have and in about 5 years from now, this might be in our lives in ways unimaginable. Veritasium is one of my favourite channel on YT. Loved the video absolutely!
Great video Derek! I have a question though, if you mentioned earlier that if you invert the Apple over then the sticky pad let's the Apple go. Which means that in order to unstick those pads we need to apply force in any direction except that of just the parallel direction, so how do geckos still stick on roofs?
5:01 maybe in future its possible, when they able to extract the blueprint (3d file) out of gecko DNA and print it with organic 3d printer just to make that hand organs at any given size... booom magic
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Great video! My son has 4 crested geckos and it’s amazing how they stick to and climb on the glass of their enclosure. Their feet feel funny too and it’s always made us wonder how
I'd love some work gloves with this. As a machinist, holding on to metal parts with normal rubber gloves is incredibly tricky if there's any oil on the part or the gloves. I imagine making this stuff is still incredibly expensive though
Amazing. Definitely want to see some climbing- but definitely as equally interested in real commercial uses- there's definitely applications in emergency self rescue type stuff- but what about something like picking up a car or a windshield? I love the idea of conveyers/sprag type deals. This is neat stuff. even just as a tape to stick to itself in a strip- in theory it could be used to wrap things, and then be released by a brief pulsed torsional shock.
@Rick OConnell if it is indeed designed, I would also love to be walked through how a perfect and intelligent designer would create some things that are disadvantageous or even useless, such as the snake crawling instead of walking or your own tailbone and appendix, instead of it being a vestigial remain of times when such things made more sense.
@TN what? this is an answerable question lmao. one day, a small genetic mutation in an ancestor to the gecko would probably have caused the branching process in the gecko's feet to take place just a little bit more before it stopped, and this gecko would have survived to pass on this genetic abnormality a little better because it could climb a little bit better to avoid predators. the geckos we have now are just millions of years of these tiny changes adding up. are you trolling?
@Rick OConnell Evolution = series of mutations. Benefitical mutations stay and features that don't get removed natural way. As an adult human, can you drink milk from for example cow or goat without getting stomach problems? If yes, then you have mutation that allows your body to break down lactose. Which is result of evolution. We still don't know if that particular mutation is going to stick.
@Syno Just sit and think a bit. How would evolution do this? People have to believe in evolution, because if they don't they must admit that it was designed. Design makes the most sense. If you don't think it's design, walk me through how for instance some snakes evolved in flattening their ribs to be able to glide. Walk me through that process.
This guy has the coolest content and I love all his videos, you learn so much!!!! Stuff that you prob won't learn about anywhere else, this channel is phenomenal
When I was between 8-10ish, I got a children’s science magazine and I clearly remember it talking about how someday there would be self-healing plastic, and how we’d be able to print physical objects, and how a material was being developed that could protect a rose from a blowtorch with just a thin layer. Now, about 20 years later, if I bought a piece of aerogel (which is amazingly something one can do for about $50), I would have all three of those inventions in my home.
I feel like this would be relatively easy to make with the right setup. Even a desktop cnc fitted with an incredibly high quality blade should be able to produce this surface directly on the "part". It would require a lot of custom toolpath work, but that shouldn't be too difficult. Or to make a mold, some sort of thermoplastic could be held at a temperature that keeps it soft for cutting, then cooled to have a more durable surface. Wish I had more time to work on this. It would be a fun project.
The way the short for this video is being used is the best way I’ve ever seen a short being used. Basically a sample of the first part of the video, instead of some 1/30 part short compilation. Would be great if all JPvidrs did it this way.
@pyropulse by no means is the dipolar interpretation of the atom basic stuff. it only becomes dipolar because of the influence from another atom. two atoms in close proximity affect each other’s charge distribution. the negative charges of the electrons are outside of the protons and so will move to cause electrostatic attraction. that is van der waals.
It would be interesting to know more about the material. How resilient is it? How it works on natural surfaces like rocks, leather, cloth? And the most important, where to buy climbing gloves? :)
Amazing! Extremely interesting research done there! For a long time now I wanted to test that kind of stuff for attaching prosthetics to limbs. And yes, please do climb a building with it!
My grandfather has a PhD in zoology and biology. I'll never forget the day when he showed me a scientific journal entry with a picture of this and how fascinating they were to him. He is an ichthyologist, so it wasn't his area of expertise; however, there were always some facts he could add to a situation or story, and how he described that truly humbled me at the time and still does. I credit my grandfather for my curiosity and thank creators like you for making me extremely proud of him, highlighting fascinating things in our universe, and invigorating those who are hungry for more knowledge. Thank you.
@ConservativeRiot I used to be a devout Christian as well. I used to study the Bible quite a lot, and I still go to church every week (not by free will). My perspective changed and I no longer saw the religion the same way I did as a child. I'm now much happier and found a new way to appreciate life, so no need to convince me to go back. Thanks for being respectful, have a great day, just be mindful of where to talk about religion so that people are more willing to listen.
@Alexandrite I used to be an enemy of God as well. I hope he opens your eyes like He did mine. At least a couple people liked my comment. I can't help but to see God's wonderful design anymore and there's nothing wrong with pointing it out. Thank you, have a wonderful day.
It would be cool to make gloves out of this so that you could pick up anything. But I also am curious weather or not this material could attach to something slightly slimy, and if not the proper way, then what about the reverse way. Would the ridges hold on to something slimy or rough better than turning it the other way?
Damn. You are the type of channel that inspires me to research nature ( Im studying biotechnology, due to the wonders of nature, which I often learn from these type of channels )
I remember seeing this when it was just a theory on popular mechanics! This was 25 years ago.. To see it as a material that can be reproduced and WORKS thats awesome. At the time it was just thel understanding of what kept geckos on walls. Now we're putting it on robots
Hello Derek, I have an idea for a video. In chemistry, I learned that in redox reactions, electrons transfer, but it was never quite explained how or why exactly they do it. I would love a video about this process, which I found out is explained using quantum mechanics. That way, I might finally understand how the electrochemical potential table forms and why different organisms are an-/aerobic on a deeper level. If you (not Derek) read this and also wonder how this works, I would appreciate if you could give this comment a push so that Derek sees it. Thanks, keep up the good work, and greetings from Switzerland. Alejandro
As far as I know from what I studied, the diffrent values for electric potentials in the table happen because you are measuring the equilibrium metals establish in their respective solutions M2+ + 2e- M if the equilibrium lies to the right with respect to the hydrogen electrode it is positive and if it lies to the left negative When you have 2 cells connected each half cell is going to have their own particular possition of equilibrium meaning one will oxdise more readily than the other so the predominant reaction of that particular metal with its solution would be M -> M2+ + 2e- since in this half cell more electrons are produced the electrode becomes negative (anode) and thus the other electrode to which it is connected is possitive with respect to the anode and so electrons travel to the cathode, reducing the metals in solution and they are deposited in the cathode the reaction would be M2+ + 2e- -> M for example This is a brief summary of what happens and could be explained better and you could go more in detail but I hope this helps you to get an idea of what is happening
You see a lot of brilliant engineering in these small systems. It's designed. It's all designed and engineered with a level of sophistication we can only dream of.
I've always thought that wander walls forces are very weak. I knew that it acted between the atomic sheets of graphite and holds the entire thing together but after seeing this video I think completely different about this amazing force which could handle sheer strength. Imagine how much strong it would be if we were to replicate it exactly like that of a gecko has!
Just for clarification all forces between partial charged atoms are called van der waals forces what he is specifically referring to is called London dispersion forces
I remember in one of my nanotechnology courses at university around 2012 one of the physics lecturers told us about people investigating this sort of technology. Amazing to see it in action.
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Kinda shows how University can have a place, but it ends up being a fraction of our lives in many cases. Uni didn't really say we'd move on and never need them, for reasons.
This video mentioned the Van der Waals force to explain how tapes shaped like a gecko's one stick to objects, but you can more simply. It's a friction. So another tips you can know here is that friction is a culmination of Van der Waals force, which is the tiniest interaction that particles can have.
@Jace White You foucs on just a different aspect of friction. It is a macroscopic property, so many thing can contribute to. For example, what you mentioned is the interaction between the particles of one side, which is called chemical bonds. The point is, even if a surface is perfectly smooth, there will be a friction. Maybe, Veritasium mentioned this ideal friction only, to simplify his explanation.
So your saying regardless of the gravity applied to the object, without the Van DER Waals force there would be no friction? I disagree, if you rub 2 pieces of sand paper together, the resistance you feel is the geometry of the 2 pieces interacting with each other, like interlocking puzzle pieces.
Great video Derek! I have a question though, when performing all those heavy tasks like pulling the car, how was the material able to handle those force because the material itself is made up of silicone right? Which I know is tensile, but not that much! So how did it withstand those forces?
I’m guessing that the backing material used provides added structural support. Some polymer films can have tensile strengths of 1,000s+ of psi! (I’ve seen some up to 20,000 psi!) However it’s also worth mentioning that towing a car across smooth flat ground may only require as little as 100 lbs of force since you only need enough force to overcome the initial rolling resistance
I _LOVE_ that you've published this. My nine year old has started a new theme at school this month, called biomimicry... I'm going to show this video to her; she'll love it.
@6th Wilbury Yeah, I think it depends on the parents, to be honest. I mean, if you are always talking about things you're fascinated with, kids will naturally be attracted to those things as well. The "Did you know" kind of facts are super popular with kids and even kids TV shows dance around this topic all the time. We give it a fancy name as an adult, but the idea that inventors design things inspired from the designs of nature isn't a difficult concept to grasp. Did you know that the kingfisher's beak inspired the Shinkansen? Did you know that sonar in submarines was an idea that we got from the design of sonar in bats or dolphins? Did you know that those Airplane winglets are inspired by the upturned wings of an Eagle? Did you know that a spider's silk scaled up to 1cm could catch a jumbo jet in flight? Kids books are FILLED with little factoids like that and they have units in school that actually teach it. Kids are naturally curious and learn about the world around them literally and so biomimetics is a useful tool OFTEN used by many science teachers... because of the way that children rely on literal interpretations of the world around them to learn as opposed to how adults are able to more easily digest abstract concepts. I just don't think it's all that uncommon.
@AtBZ 🧤 Because if that was my child, I'd be proud of my child. And want to make them happier. And share the happiness with others, because the world is a slightly better place having known.
@6th Wilbury 9-year olds are very often interested in biomimicry. How could you not be? It's adults that take the amazing designs around us for granted... maybe because they were taught to just blow it off as a product of random accidents.
@AtBZ 🧤 No kidding. My kids had a unit on biomimicry as well. It's pretty much a standard thing that they teach in elementary school these days. I have helped BOTH my daughters still in regular old public elementary schools do projects on the amazing designs of the world around us. Everything from the remarkable strength to weight ratio of the Toucan's beak, to the kingfisher's beak's inspiration for Japan's bullet trains. Intelligent humans design things around them all the time... and although generally far inferior to the the natural designs around us, still impressive and starts with curiosity.
Great video! Van der Walls Force is incredible but be Warned once you want to calculate the energy in the interaction from an appropriate Hamiltonian you will see what a nightmare it can be but anyways still very cool stuff
Looking at the structure of Gecko feet reminds me of the structure of some mushrooms. I wonder if there would be a way to engineer a fungus that would grow in a pattern similar to gecko feet to get the more sophisticated design?
This is so ground breaking if you ask me, there are many practical application. I wonder the tremendous progress we'll have if we can replicate the interesting parts of nature. Finally, a Spidey suit, next one should be Iron man's
I hope one day this technology is adapted as plasters/medical tape. My newborn requires an NG tube for feeding and we have to tape it to his cheek, but he is allergic to adhesive and we are now in a battle over managing his poor skin degrading. It makes me happy to think how future families in similar situations could benefit from this concept.
Bro you know your science that's for sure. You're incredibly entertaining to listen to. I love science but I'll be the first one to say I wish I had made it a bigger part of my life.
Hi Veritasium, For the purpose of accuracy, the gecko in your demonstration @3:14 is a leopard gecko. This is one of the few geckos which uses claws instead of grippy pads and cannot climb on glasslike surfaces. A better model would have been a crested gecko. -my gecko obsessed partner.
This exact effect was the reason I studied materials science in my masters. It's just incredible how far we have come, that we are able to use such effects on materials that *.*
@Sean Kane as they say in the video, what they can do is a very raw bad approx of what a gecko can. I would say they do not more than a mere 5-10% (i am being optimistic) and so, the possibilities are HUGE. We need to learn how to build something purely from a DNA.. like a cell does. Crispr is great to modify DNA, but to have a sheet of "gecko foot" made from the Gecko DNA (and then even improving it!) is pure science fiction nowadays. Having this capability will open the "God door" with unimaginable possibilities. We are so so far from that (50 years?)
@Enorazza Right? I'm so curious how much better is the gecko than the artificial version, considering we seem to be able to fill the same surface area. Is it something like 80% as good, 95% as good? What if it were like half as good as the gecko? Crazy to think of the possibilities were that the case and we just need to iterate on the processes
@Gladius I'd imagine so if the vinyl sheets mentioned use this force, but I have noticed some that are noticeably sticky one one side so perhaps some indeed use a thin adhesive in some fashion
that stuff is amazing. great combination of surface physics chemistry and mechanics all inspired by nature. Would be very interesting to see if we couldn't 'grow' something similar to the tiny fibrils the gecko's feet use.
I really hope this gets improved upon cause this would be so useful for many different things. (Like not needing a ladder maybe) But also I can't be the only one who has dreamed of climbing like a gecko for fun (or spiderman/xenomorph) xD
if a human pulled the whales weight the tape would scale up from tiny robot size to human size too right? So if we just wanted to climb with the tape and carry our own weight instead of a whole whale, the scale of the lamella could be sized up by a lot, right? the biggest problem would be that our hands and feet are too small of a contact area in comparison to what the little robot used. we'd need some sort of exoskeleton to size up our feet and hands.
@Blobbyo25 Maybe jesus existed, but god does not. The bible was written thousands of years ago, it remains the only thing really unchanged by humans throughout that time, do you get what I'm alluding to? It is wayy outdated for modern times. Religion is not needed anymore because we are a modern society and have answers for the things happening around us. Snap out of your delusions already, if there were a god, then he would be all powerful, and there would not be any of the horrors happening in the world that do today.
Very cool tech. It's hard to improve upon evolution, regardless of how advanced our technology has become. I'd love to see the day when these fine structures (spatula) can be accurately replicated.
The first min i had a guess for an image of how this works exactly in my brain. I was happy watching the video because i was literally spot on 100% 😂 maybe i am a gecko after all 😅
Definitely want a gecko suit now. On another thought, could tires be made of this stuff? I'd be interested in seeing how long the tread would last, or if pavement is just too rough for it to work at all.
No, because tires need to be able to wear down like an eraser, and those razor sharp treats would wear down immediately at high speeds. Not to mention you need to grip non-smooth, dirty, wet, and snowy surfaces... it would be interesting to see how they perform on ice though.
Richard K Morgan, in Altered Carbon conceptualized a gecko suit which was used by Takeshi Kovacs for covert infiltration....pretty cool to see something like that in action.
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One question I came away with is: are the Gecko toes directional like the artificial material, or is their structure so fine that they don't need to flatten in order to stick?
@N C If you don't mind me saying, that is an entirely unsafe conclusion. I can understand how you might categorise individuals as being creative or precise, without realising that some are both. One never quite knows who is contributing to these threads.. but thanks for your comment.
@andrew cobb If you need to focus that hard on a missing apostrophe, it's safe to say 'combing for arbitrary missed characters in comment sections' might be your skill set, whereas mine is more 'having thoughts and knowing things.'
@N C we're not the experts in this matter so our deal is to assume. You can not make conclusions from the photo either. So you are assuming things too. Am I wrong?
I know your rods of God episode was a total bomb, but I too was interested in that premise. So I'm glad you dabbled in it. This was a great episode, very cool gecko skin.
Yes, Derek. I do want to see you climb something using gecko socks. One question, regardless of how strong the grip is, the material it's made of has to be strong enough to with stand the weight of what it's pulling doesn't it? So what are those strips made of that can withstand the weight of a car between just 4 of them?
You could do the same thing with regular duct tape, since there's not a lot of force involved, but the op provides a valid point. If one were to use this for lifting any meaningful amount of weight, the material will need to be far stronger.
Keep in mind the idea that the tape is “pulling” the weight of car is a little misleading. It’s not like the tape needs to hold the weight of a 3000lb sedan. All you need to do to pull a car on flat ground is to overcome the rolling resistance of the car while it is in neutral. For a 3000lbs sedan that might be something like 50-100lbs. This is an amount of force humans can easily provide hence why you’ll see people pushing their car when stuck or out of gas.
That's so cool. It's amazing how something can be so simple but so complicated to replicate. And to be honest I still don't understand the part where it can pull a car... Unrelated, but when I saw the brilliant ad at the end, I realized something obvious: Artificial Intelligence is gonna be a mandatory subject in schools eventually. That's mindblowing to me. I've always postponed learning about neural networks and AI even though I was interested in it. Now, I _know_ I will end up learning how it works eventually, wether I like it or not lol
@Applied Science did an excellent DIY version of this a few years back. Seeing the car being pulled by the tape looks very impressive. I'm wondering how meaningful that demonstration is, since a car is designed to move with low friction. I assume the static and dynamic friction was the major force holding it in place, since it wasn't moving very fast intertia probably didn't play a large factor. What sorts of forces did it pull?
That's easy to determine. Put your car in neutral and try to push it. You will get an idea of the force needed. You are correct in that static friction keeps the car from moving. But as soon as it moves, dynamic or rolling friction takes over. That said, the most force needed is to get the car first moving - overcoming the static friction. After that, the force needed to keep in moving is much less. SO the impressive part of the demo is that the device got the car moving in the first place! Tires are designed to have enormous static friction and very low rolling friction.
Years on after leaving school and I am continuously impressed by the quality of the content you provide for free that far exceeds most institutions. It’s just amazing how simply you explain concepts in a quarter of an hour.
This is stuff i would think of as a child and now all these years later science has brought us o the point where EVERYTHING, all the weird thoughts of how things work and how we could use that to our advantage has been played out in front me on a computer screen . its mind boggling
Damm this video made me realize how much power we ”waste” like if things were calibrated optimally in the physical realm it doesnt seem to be hard to do anythibg really. Lift, move, whatever we’re talking about. Like 4 pieces of tape can pull a car all because the contact area in which the energy transfers is finally ”bigger”. Mindboggling
When I was in School, about 15 years ago, we had this book "Geko's Foot" in our library, it was full of how amazing and fascinating the Geko's foot was! The ideas discussed in the book are now a reality! Science does make progress!
@Robert Pruitt I mean it is easier to sit your ass at home and demand progress when you are not the one at work. We tend to see scientific and technological advancement as something that is bound to happen and that we are 100% entitled to. Although it's like it's almost impossible to slow its pace down now 'cause many hands are on deck, these things have always been done by people like ourselves and they actually take time. It's just that successful ones are easy to spot than thousand of the unknown, failed procedures leading to successful ones.
@Earthling six billion something and one Things have always taken quite a while. We just didn't hear about the research until it was getting close to market. We might be more advanced than in decades past, but we're also doing more complicated things. It took NASA 20 years to get JWST done. But they had to invent half a dozen new technologies and advance them enough to be usable in space. It took 11 years to make the Blu-ray. Even though it's just a DVD with a different color laser and new programming. It was 80 years after the invention of the fridge before you could buy one in a store.
I want this as a replacement for those single use adhesives used for command hooks, though I don't think this would work very well on a traditionally painted wall.
They did think of it a long time before. I remember watching a documentary mentioning it (the idea of making a gecko-like skin) around 10 years ago (and the documentary itself wasn't that new at the time either). Obviously, they needed a lot of time to progress this far
No wonder a mere "geek science" channel has 13.3M subscribers. The wonders are a scientist/s were smart enough to figure this out as well as realise real world applications for it. The other is that nature never stops teaching. Endlessly fascinating. Thank you.
I'm surprised how creative the team got when manufacturing the material/characterizing the force. I thought it would be closer to the methods of silicon etching and nanostructure growing
@hazonku I suspect a metal mold will not release the silicone without micro-tears of the tiny ridges which will ruin the gripping properties. And at the tiny scale they are working in prohibits using a mold release agent which would take too much space. I think the main draw of using wax is that it will easily release and separate from the silicone once cured
@notahotshot Given I actively factored communication out of that statement, I'm definitely not confusing the two. Only the first point I made was about ease of communication. My second statement - the one you quoted - was not about communication. Plus precision doesn't come from standardization; ease of communication does, which you supposedly think has nothing to do with precision. On top of which, you're mis-attributing the word nomenclature. What you call the measurements is irrelevant to how the system works or which values are used for scaling. The odd nomenclature doesn't reinforce or dissolve either of our points, so I don't see why you feel the need to remind me of it. As for the creation of the metric system - people make new systems because it's easier to get people to bandwagon onto a new thing than it is to change how they use an old thing. I'm aware that it had nothing to do with precision at the time, which is why I didn't make that argument. On the other hand, that doesn't mean that metric - as we know it today - is less precise. The reason Imperial is naturally less precise is because every unit has it's an individual scalar value. Every time you have to translate between those scales, there's a risk of a translation error, which grows exponentially every time you switch unit. And that's not a communication thing - that's a maths thing. The same risk holds true for digital computation. You're clearly stuck on the idea of minutiae aspect of precision rather than accuracy, and if you want to say that the thou is more precise than a millimetre, then I'd agree (before reminding you of nanometres and all the other units smaller than 0.1 thou), but the Imperial system *as a whole* is imprecise when compared to the metric system *as a whole.*
@Samurai Pipotchi "That's naturally more precise." No, it's not. You're confusing ease of communication with precision within the system. Precision comes from standardization, and from how finely divided your measurements are, not how you name them. I can divide imperial measurements just as finely as you can divide metric. The issue with imperial was that the length of the measurements were not standardized. Rather than getting everyone to agree on how to define the length of a yard, a new measurement, the meter, was devised, and the base measurement defined. Then the measurement was later redefined multiple times. Because of the natural inaccuracy of the definitions used. The world could have just as easily standardized on imperial, if an agreement on how to define the measurements could have been reached. Note that I did say, in my previous comment, that the nomenclature could have been better.
@notahotshot Because it's true for a lot of us. I'm in the UK. Our tools use mm adjustments - just like almost every non-english speaking country. Trying to describe which metric adjustment you need while using imperial terms is going to lead to a natural imprecision. There's also the benefit that metric technically only has one unit of measurement and the terminology just specifies where we're putting the decimal place. That's naturally a more precise system than one that changes it's scaling based on which unit you're using.
@Samurai Pipotchi "Metric is necessary when it comes to precision measurements..." Why do people make this claim? I can divide imperial measurements in as fine an increment as needed to get as accurate a measurement as required. The nomenclature could have been better for the divisions, but the nomenclature has no effect on the level of accuracy possible.
Two right angles exist on a perfecly level horizon, obviously parallel, at what point do they stop being so? Can you construct an experiment so we can visualize the results?
