A Personalized Overview of Homogenization II

Abstract

I mentioned earlier that instantaneous forces at a distance are nonphysical, because of the principle of relativity of POINCARé, since instantaneity is impossible to define, but distance is not such an easy concept either, if one considers that for stars up to a few light-years or about one parsec away,¹ the distance is measured by parallax, since these nearby stars move slightly with respect to the background in the course of a year, and further away the stars are too far for measuring their distance, but one observed some relation between luminosity and distance for those stars which are near enough, and so one switches to measuring luminosity, and one pretends that one is measuring “distance”, and further away one switches to something else by way of another observed relation that one postulates to be always true, so that when astronomers say that the red-shift is proportional to distance, one wonders if they, almost unknowingly, used the red-shift as a measure of their “distance”.