The Folly Of The Meter

The basic unit of length in the Metric System is the meter. But it is an arbitrary length that was chosen in the Eighteenth Century. A meter was originally supposed to be defined as one ten-millionth of the distance between the north pole and the equator, but that did not end up as the final definition.

The meter is an arbitrary length that doesn't actually accomplish anything. I believe that units of measurement should be chosen that, as far as is practical, do something to make measuring or calculating easier.

I think it would be ideal to base the definition of the unit of length on gravity. The meter was chosen as the fundamental unit of length in the Eighteenth Century, long before the acceleration due to gravity was very important. But today we are in the era of, not only very tall buildings, but also aeronautics, satellites and space exploration. Having a unit of length based on gravity would make calculations much easier.

The most important and frequent thing that we measure is time. The fundamental Metric unit of time is the second, which is roughly the duration of a human heartbeat. The second works well as the unit of time. It is a short duration, but not too short for humans to grasp.

The second, as time, and gravity will give us our ideal measure of length. If we go up on a building and drop a dense compact object, something like a ball bearing, in one second it will fall 4.9 meters or 16 feet. I believe that this would be the ideal unit of length. I call it a "grav", for gravity.

The acceleration due to gravity, relatively near the earth's surface, is twice this, 9.8 meters per second squared or 32 feet per second squared. I get 16 feet or 4.9 meters as a grav because the dropped object has an initial velocity of zero and a velocity, after one second of falling, of 32 feet per second or 9.8 meters per second. Thus it's average velocity for the first second of falling is 16 feet per second or 4.9 meters per second, so that if it falls for one second it will fall 16 feet or 4.9 meters.

At the end of the second second it's velocity will be 64 feet per second or 19.6 meters per second. So in two seconds the object will have fallen four times as far as in one second. Four is two squared, or multiplied by itself, and this is why there is the squared in the gravitational formula for acceleration.

This means that if we were to use a grav as our basic unit of length calculations with regard to anything vertical, tall buildings, aeronautics, satellites and, impacts from space, would be easier. 

If a dense compact object falls for a given number of seconds, all we have to do is square the number of seconds to get the distance that it fell in gravs.

If there is a given altitude all we have to do is take the square root of the altitude in gravs to get the number of seconds it will take for the object to fall from that altitude.

Unlike the arbitrary length of the meter our unit of length will actually be accomplishing something by making calculations easier. The Metric System was developed before tall buildings were common, and before aircraft and space travel.