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You cannot measure how fast light travels in a fixed time unit without reference to time: you need to define length! Length is currently defined with reference to caesium time: the 2019 SI definition of metre takes "the fixed numerical value of the speed of light in vacuum c to be 299792458 when expressed in the unit m⋅s−1, where the second is defined in terms of the caesium frequency ΔνCs." (From [1].)

As far as I can see, measuring time is the foundation of all definitions of other units. And the core reason why time is used to define everything else, is pragmatic: it's just technically easier to count (photon absorption) than to do anything else.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_redefinition_of_the_SI_ba...




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