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This is neat, but still something if a coincidence.

It appears the first definition of a metre is in fact around 1/4e10 the circumference of Earth, and the further coincidence is that a 1m mathematical pendulum has a period of almost exactly 2 seconds.

So there's still a neat relationship between mass/radius of Earth, its diurnal rotation period and the Babylonian division of it into 86,400 seconds.



According to the article the 1/4e10 circumference definition came second


Wikipedia says the Earth circumference definition comes from around Copernican times.

Also my reading of TFA is that the pendulum definition was in fact a redefinition that didn't catch on.


I wonder how many numbers they checked until they arrived on this one. As to me it seems picked as something close enough for committee work.




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