Blogtrek

Metric System and the Kilofoot

I saw a review of a book "The Measure of All Things", by Ken Alder, about how the meter was first defined. The review was entitled "The Meter is a Crock". The book was about two Frenchmen who surveyed in a triangulated form stretches of land all across Europe, to estimate the distance between the North Pole and the Equator. The meter was then defined to be one ten-millionth of this distance. The review showed how mistakes were made in the surveying, and that the Frenchmen assumed that the Earth was a sphere when actually it is slightly oblate. However, neither the book nor the review offers an alternative to the meter; if it supposed to be a "crock", then what's better?

Here is my answer: the foot. Yes, the foot. This is English measure, but we are used to feet in measuring things. What I would change the definition of the foot. Right now it is 12 inches, and an inch is defined to be 2.54 centimeters. I would define it as the distance that light travels in a nanosecond, one billionth of a second. Then the speed of light would be a gigafoot per second. I would not use miles, yards, or inches, but rather metric versions of the foot: kilofoot, decafoot, millifoot, decifoot (the new inch), and so forth. So I can talk about traveling 2800 kilofeet or 2.8 megafeet to drive somewhere in a day rather than 530 miles. Further, this would be useful in dealing with computers. If there is a billion operations per second (1 GHz), then one operation can take place only within a foot, since nothing can travel faster than light. Most importantly, the foot would be defined on a natural measure, in terms of the speed of light and in terms of time - a second is 1/86400 of a day.