keesan@bbncca.ARPA (Morris Keesan) (10/25/83)
Well, the international standards community certainly considers the speed of light to be a constant. This weeks's _S_c_i_e_n_c_e_ _N_e_w_s reports that the official international definition of a meter is a specific fraction of the speed of light in a vacuum. The meter was previously defined in terms of the wavelength of a particular color of light, with a specification of how to produce that wavelength, and prior to that the meter was defined as the distance between two marks on a platinum-iridium bar kept somewhere in Paris.