The meter isn’t really arbitrary, even when you ignore the redefinition posted by @jumperalex. It was originally defined as 1/10,000,000th the distance from Earth’s pole to the equator, which is a pretty reasonable basis to use by 1791 standards.
True, but it was the 18th century. They could measure earthly things well enough, not so much photons.
It’s a bit of a shame it wasn’t redefined as 1/300,000,000th of the distance light travels in a second when it was redefined, but the redefinition was about 50 years too late for that to happen. A difference of 0.07% in the base unit of measurement used by all science would’ve been far too much for 2019, given all the precision measurements we do these days.
The meter isn’t really arbitrary, even when you ignore the redefinition posted by @jumperalex. It was originally defined as 1/10,000,000th the distance from Earth’s pole to the equator, which is a pretty reasonable basis to use by 1791 standards.
That’s pretty damn arbitrary on a universal scale
Everything is pretty arbitrary on a universal scale. Except the speed of light. Which is really fucking slow on a universal scale too.
But not arbitrarily.
True, but it was the 18th century. They could measure earthly things well enough, not so much photons.
It’s a bit of a shame it wasn’t redefined as 1/300,000,000th of the distance light travels in a second when it was redefined, but the redefinition was about 50 years too late for that to happen. A difference of 0.07% in the base unit of measurement used by all science would’ve been far too much for 2019, given all the precision measurements we do these days.