Thoghts from the middle of the night...

OK, so, what IS a meter, anyway? Is there some real-life reference, like for the kilo, which is what the thing that somebody decided was a kilo? That is, there is a real-life mass of something, metal I think, that is the referent for the kilo. It is what a kilo is, that exact mass.

But is there a meter somewhere that is the meter? The reason I ask is that it occurred to me that if we lengthened the meter slightly, I think it's lengthen and not shorten, then you wouldn't have to depend on the kindness of your physics professor for g (the gravitational constant) to equal 10 meters per second squared. (The nice ones always did, the jerks never did.) Right now it's kind of 9.98, if I recall aright. (Which is why it was so jerky of the mean ones not to allow g=10m/s/s). Why not redefine the meter, if there is no actual definition, to be the distance over which matter accelerates by 1 second?