A naukri.com initiative
Medium
3d
213
Image Credit: Medium
What is a Meter?
- The French Enlightenment of 1789 culminated in a government overthrow based upon logic, tradition, and religious belief.
- Before the metric system, the foot (pied) served as a unit of measurement in France and England. The length of these measurements were not precisely defined
- The French conceived the metric system in 1791 as a unit of measure based on both physical standards and decimal inclusion to facilitate arithmetic.
- The ratio that the French chose was a unit of 1, in a system based purely on calculation.
- The French chosen unit was the distance from the equator to the North Pole at the Paris Meridian.
- They determine this distance to be 10,000,000 meters, making the length of the meter 1/10,000,000th of this distance.
- In 1983, the definition of a meter was changed to be a fraction of the speed of light. That distance is defined and measured as the distance that light travels in 1/299,792,458 seconds.
- The choice of a physical standard for distance in the metric system was deliberate and meant to be practical.
- Newton described light traveling at a fixed speed and Maxwell's equations relied on the constant speed of light. Einstein's Theory of Relativity also required a fixed speed for his equations to be true.
- The metric system evolution has improved precision, reduced calculation time, and simplified arithmetic.
Read Full Article
12 Likes
For uninterrupted reading, download the app