Having said that, we’re pretty lucky that using those pretty arbitrary values we ended up with a speed that you can approximate as 300 million m/s and be off by less than 0.1%.
My understanding is that the person proposing the meter’s distance immediately caught their mistake but didn’t bring it up because they didn’t want people to think the system was flawed, not so much that the measurement was off.
Having said that, we’re pretty lucky that using those pretty arbitrary values we ended up with a speed that you can approximate as 300 million m/s and be off by less than 0.1%.
My understanding is that the person proposing the meter’s distance immediately caught their mistake but didn’t bring it up because they didn’t want people to think the system was flawed, not so much that the measurement was off.