Meter to Femtometer Converter

What is one Meter? Define the metre using time

One of the first recorded units of length the cubit was created in ancient Egypt. Based on the length of a human forearm, this important idea of a standard unit of length evolved over the next 5,000 years into the measuring systems we use today. The foot is another ancient unit of length. It was probably based on the length of a human foot. The problem of course is whose foot? Possibly the length of the Kings foot, but Kings come and go along with their feet.

in 1324, King Edward II of england, proposed a solution involving the inch. The inch represent 1/12 of a foot and it had been defined as the average width of a man's thumb. This of course has the same problem as the foot, whose thumbs are we using?

Barley was a common grain growing in England, a single grain of barley is called a barley corn. King Edward created a statue that legally defined the inch as three barley corns dry and round placed end to end lengthwise. Three barley corns define an inch and 12 inches to define a foot. King Edward thought, he had solved the problem. But of course like feet and thumbs, not all barley corns are created equal.

Despite these problems, the barley corn continued to play a role as the base unit of the British measuring system for centuries. Confusion about the inch continued until 1959 when the international community officially defined the inch as decimal 0.0254 of a metre which of course creates another problem, how do we define a metre?

The story of the metre begins in 18th century France. The French faced the same dilemma as everyone else, finding an acceptable base unit of length. A committee of academics was created to solve this problem. in April of 1790, Talleyrand, the Bishop of Autun made a remarkable proposal to the Assembly of French weights and measures. Talleyrand proposed that a unit of length called the metre could be based on time. He had been studying pendulums and knew that the period of a pendulum that is its rate of swing was determined by length. Short pendulum swing back and forth rapidly, long pendulum slowly. An interesting fact about pendulums is that the mass of the pendulum Bob doesn't affect the rate of swing and within certain limits the amplitude of the swing is also not a factor. The length determines the period of the pendulum.

It is possible by adjusting the length to create a pendulum that will take precisely one second to swing from one side to the other. Talleyrand proposed that a pendulum like this a precision one second pendulum be constructed and that the length of this pendulum be used as the standard length one meter, time would define length an elegant solution.

Talleyrand realized that tiny changes in gravity affected the rate of a pendulum and that gravity changed with location on the planet, so he added to his proposal that this pendulum be created at latitude 45 degrees a line of latitude passing through France. talleyrand's proposal was studied for a year but an expert committee decided that the best definition for a metre was to use one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the pole. Despite the difficulty of actually measuring the distance from the equator to the pole, this definition for the metre prevailed into the 1900s.

With bars of various exotic metals being created to represent the official metre. This was not a perfect solution, even the politics of the time was complicated which country would hold the official metre.

In 1983 the dilemma appeared to have been solved when the definition of the metre returned to time. The speed of light in a vacuum is defined as 299,792,458 meters per second. This means that one metre is the distance that light travels in this fraction of a second. We are now using time to define the metre just like talleyrand's pendulum based metre of 1790.

It may have occurred to you that we still have a problem how do we determine one second? We could say that one second is the time it takes light to travel 299,792,458 meters. But then we need an independent definition of the metre, we don't have one. At the moment one second is defined using the oscillations of a cesium atom. This leaves the metre defined by time we have connected length in time. Perhaps this simple idea of defining length using time led Einstein to the revelation that time and space are linked.

The femtometer (symbol: fm) is an SI unit of length equal to 10⁻¹⁵ meters, which means a quadrillionth of one.

Formula 1:-

fm = m / 1.0E-15

Formula 2:-

fm = m * 1.0E+15

Here's how to convert 5 Meter to Femtometer using the formula 1 and formula 2.
Example:: 5 m = ? fm

Using Formula 1:-

5 m = (5 ÷ 1.0E-15) fm = 5.0E+15 fm

Using Formula 2:-

5 m = (5 × 1.0E+15) fm = 5000000000000000 fm