• 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.