~15 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Conversion of units is the conversion of the unit of measurement in which a quantity is expressed, typically through a multiplicative conversion factor that changes the unit without changing the quantity. This is also often loosely taken to include replacement of a quantity with a corresponding quantity that describes the same physical property.
Unit conversion is often easier within a metric system such as the SI than in others, due to the system's coherence and its metric prefixes that act as power-of-10 multipliers.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “conversion of units” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.