18 12 15 9 Atto PicoFemto Nano is 150 gigametres from the Earth and our closest neighbouring galaxies are already thousands of billions of giga metres away Because the trusty metre takes on astronomical values in outer space astronomers use light years to measure distances in the universe This is the distance travelled by light over the course of one year It was none other than Albert Einstein who recognised that the speed of light was a constant and deduced its value from his theory of relativity In a vacuum light covers exactly 299 792 458 metres in one sec while we re familiar with kilometres and centimetres femtometres and gigame tres are sure to cause a frown or two The first of these is used to measure the nu cleus of an atom while the latter is used to measure the distance to the moon THE METRE IS DEFINED BY LIGHT A gigametre represents a million kilometres The moon is one third of a gigametre from the Earth the sun Feet cubits and miles are a thing of the past it s official These days the metre is the measure of all things all around the world even if the Anglo Ameri can cultural sphere still struggles with it And yet even there the metre takes precedence over inches and miles in the sciences and in industry The triumphant advance of the metre began in 18th cen tury France In 1795 the original metre was defined as the ten millionth part of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator Based on the metre we can divide every length into decimal parts THE METRE IS THE UNIVERSAL MEASURE WE USE IT TO MEASURE OUR ENTIRE WORLD FROM GALAXIES TO ATOMS the measure of all things 10 to the power of x metres 26 PERSPECTIVES

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