• jumperalex@lemmy.world
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    11 days 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

    • marcos@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      You are correctly trying to say it’s well defined, but you are complaining about the wrong comment. You should check the meaning of “arbitrary” again.

      Anyway, it’s not entirely arbitrary because it was created to represent a “round” fraction of the Earth’s circumference that is similar to the length of a person’s arms. But it deviated from that too, so it’s subjective how much that counts.