Made to measure

The government started reviewing whether we should stay two metres apart while social distancing or whether one metre would do. What is a metre?

— Since 1960 it has been defined as the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458th of a second.

— But it was originally defined by the post-revolution French government as one ten-millionth of the distance between the Equator and the North Pole, on a meridian through Paris.