Second sound travels about 343 meters in one second in air; light takes 1.3 seconds to reach Earth from the surface of the Moon, a distance of 384,400 kilometers. A second is part of other units, such as frequency measured in hertz (inverse seconds or second), speed (meters per second) and acceleration (meters per second squared). The metric system unit becquerel, a measure of radioactive decay, is measured in inverse seconds. The meter is defined in terms of the speed of light and the second; definitions of the metric base units ampere and candela also depend on the second. Of the
Frequency Frequency Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit of time. It is also referred to as temporal "frequency", which emphasizes the contrast to spatial frequency and angular frequency. The period is the duration of time of one cycle in a repeating event, so the period is the reciprocal of the frequency. For example: if a newborn baby's heart beats at a frequency of 120 times a minute, its period—the time interval between beats—is half a second (60 seconds divided by 120 beats). Frequency is an important parameter used in science and engineering to specify the