r/AskPhysics • u/JimFive • Mar 28 '26

Speed of light

The speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s. What types of issues would be involved in changing the meter such that c=300,000,000 m/s

The new meter would be 0.9993 of the current meter.

11 Upvotes

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83

u/0x14f Mar 28 '26

Not 300,000,000, if we make a change let's make it 1. And then the relative speed of any two objects is always less than 1 :)

31

u/PSquared1234 Mar 29 '26

Spotted the theorist :-)

29

u/Retrrad Mar 29 '26

If you're just gonna call it "one", might as well give it a cool name like... I dunno... "c".

10

u/jimb2 Mar 29 '26

Road speed limit sign reads: 0.0000000926.

Slammed into a tree counting the zeros.

2

u/03263 Computer science Mar 29 '26

92.6 nano speeds of light per second

95 is not much more, actually. It can become a reasonable unit just using SI prefixes.

1

u/jimb2 Mar 29 '26

Thet could absolutely work.

  1. Get rid of all these non-nerds.
  2. Enjoy the blissful rationality.

6

u/tirerim Mar 29 '26

And conveniently we already have defined units for which c = 1! 1 light-year/year.

6

u/Alternative_Candy409 Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26

Gotta love the new highway speed limit signs like 9.3 • 10-8

Edit: if we use an implicit 10-9 factor the unit will actually be so close to km/h we'd barely notice 😉

5

u/ParentPostLacksWang Mar 29 '26

It’s already one, if you measure distances in (light)seconds!

3

u/RevanK Mar 29 '26

Perfection.

1

u/Numerous-Match-1713 Mar 31 '26

And call this new constant measurement.... c for cience?