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Converting length to time and vice versa ...
For centuries it did not occur to anyone to try to convert
time
to distance. Then Einstein, Minkowsky and that gang started fooling around with
relativity
and thought it would be convenient to express time and distance in the same
units. They were not at liberty to decide how many meters equal a second
because, given the existing definition of a meter and a second, that conversion
factor was already decided by nature. Meters per second (m/s) is speed and
Nature has a favorite speed, that of light. So rather than base the conversion
on a speed that was different in different
reference frames,
they went with 299,792,458 m/s. We will customarily round that off to
300,000,000 m/s for convenience. So 1 second = 300,000,000 meters and
1 meter = 1/300,000,000 seconds.
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