• Acamon@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Anyone come up with a good measure of distance that makes the speed of light a nice round number? I like the metric system, but the meter feels pretty arbitrary. We could do better!

    • jumperalex@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Not arbitrary.

      Since 2019, the meter has been defined as the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of ⁠1/299792458⁠ of a second, where the second is defined by a hyper-fine transition frequency of caesium.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre

      • verdare@piefed.blahaj.zone
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        5 months ago

        I mean, that is pretty arbitrary. The reason the divisor is that specific constant is because we already had meters before we knew the speed of light.