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.
One light year is 9.4607379e+15 meters, so there’s a power of 10 that could give us a unit of length close to 94 cm. That would not be as arbitrary.
But fuck me if we discover the speed of light in a vacuum has not been constant along the history of the universe, the c would be an awful base for cosmic distance, or very long term science.
But don’t worry, humanity doesn’t look like it will exist long enough to do very long term science.
Not arbitrary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre
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.
Then it’s lucky the numbers line up as well as they do, no?
One light year is 9.4607379e+15 meters, so there’s a power of 10 that could give us a unit of length close to 94 cm. That would not be as arbitrary.
But fuck me if we discover the speed of light in a vacuum has not been constant along the history of the universe, the c would be an awful base for cosmic distance, or very long term science.
But don’t worry, humanity doesn’t look like it will exist long enough to do very long term science.