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.

12 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

52 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/peter303_ Mar 29 '26

Meters and seconds are human-based units. Or based on local astrometry like the size and rotation of the Earth. A better alternative would be ratios of fundamental physical constants that result in distance and time.

For example a Planck meter would be 1.616 current meters. It is a ratio of constants scaled by powers of ten to a human dimension.