|
|
|
|
|
by Tomte
4201 days ago
|
|
You can always invent a name (and "light year" is nothing else, just not based on a "round" number of meters). For example, since failure rates in safety engineering are usually pretty small and nobody wants to pronounce "something times ten to the minus eight" or similar, the term "fit" was invented to stand for 10^-9. (Although I admit that "failure in time" is a stupid name for a dimensionless constant) Similarly you could invent a "galactic length" or however you'd like to call it. |
|
Meters, however, have a different story; the meter was invented by some French scientist about the time they were changing everything after the revolution, including month names; somehow month names reverted back to normal, but meters stayed. The meter was initially defined as 1/40,000,000 of the length of a meridian. Here only the length of the meridian is natural to some extent, although I fail to see how it is relevant to what is normally measured with meters, and the constant is completely artificial.