• Brosplosion@lemmy.zip
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    12 hours ago

    Pedantic, but anything measurable and continuous is impossible to precisely represent. π/e meters for example.

    • TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz
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      10 hours ago

      If you want to be even more pedantic you could say no metre stick is exactly 1 metre long according to the current definition of a metre. If you want to be scientific then all of them are within some reasonable range like 1.000 ± 0.002 m. If you want to be historic then at one time there was a perfect metre stick

      In 1799, the metre was redefined in terms of a prototype metre bar. The bar used was changed in 1889, and in 1960 the metre was redefined in terms of a certain number of wavelengths of a certain emission line of krypton-86. The current definition was adopted in 1983 and modified slightly in 2002 to clarify that the metre is a measure of proper length. From 1983 until 2019, the metre was formally defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum in 1/299792458⁠ of a second.