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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • turdas@suppo.fitoScience Memes@mander.xyzFictional
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    8 days ago

    Nature doesn’t care about anything. It is not a conscious thing. The size of the Earth, however, is a natural phenomenon, just like the speed of light. It just isn’t a universal constant, relatively unchanging though it may be.

    A multiplier is obviously going to be necessary whatever the base measure, because there’s no universal constant that happens to be of a useful, human scale. Or I guess you could use something like the wavelength of the hydrogen line – about 21.1 cm, a fairly useful length – but that isn’t really inherently a special wavelength, it just happens to be useful in radio astronomy.


  • turdas@suppo.fitoScience Memes@mander.xyzFictional
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    8 days ago

    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.





  • turdas@suppo.fitoScience Memes@mander.xyzFictional
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    8 days ago

    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.