-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Sunday 2006-05-07 at 15:36 +0200, Per Jessen wrote:
Perhaps just for completeness - the French actually made sure that everything fits by being a major driving force being the SI (aka "Metric") system of units.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI (lots of interesting information, worth a read).
AFAIK, the old platinum/iridium standard 1 meter was/is kept in a vault in Paris?
Maybe. It was superseded by a number of wavelengths, so to speak (length of the path travelled by light in absolute vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second). I think it was othe British yard standard that melted on a fire, and the definition now relies on the relation to the meter. - -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFEXgDItTMYHG2NR9URAn+mAJ0em5h7RPacZyxFBPpE1VnNX41MSgCbBLxZ 1W+qnUlYpYw1UivL5M/Ip3U= =L7ox -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----