this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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Science Memes

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submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

By that logic, there's also no such thing as a meter either. It's defined as a distance light travels in a time interval proportional to the inverse of a frequency related to the caesium-133 atom. Definitions don't mean there's "no such thing" as something, it's just a matter of if the units are useful in a given context. And meters are more useful in most everyday contexts.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

In timekeeping, there are so called stratums to describe how correct a clock is.

Stratum 0 is a physical process, an inherent property of the universe. An atomic clock would be stratum 0.

Stratum 1 is a clock defined based on a stratum 0 clock. For example, GPS clocks are usually stratum 1, so are timeservers at universities with atomic clocks.

Stratum 2 is a clock defined based on a stratum 1 clock, for example, your router's ntp server if it syncs its time based on gps or a university's timeserver.

So if we adopt this jargon for units:

Meter is a stratum 1 unit, defined based on the stratum 0 properties of lightspeed and cesium resonance.

Inch is a stratum 2 unit, defined based on the stratum 1 meter.