I noticed this immediately I read Arp's Seeing Red, after having first read The Electric Universe. All of a sudden I realized that without parallax and "standard candles" (Cepheid variables and SN1A's), and the concept that redshift occurs for more than Doppler/expansion reasons we have no current way of knowing how far really distant objects are, nor their intrinsic brightness/luminosity as a result, nor their true sizes, nor their age nor that of the universe, if it has an age. (I just call it "indefinite" and assume that it is much, much, much greater than scientists presume to make it.) Despite what the interpreters say at NASA/Hubble, even the most recent pictures taken of the deepest field yet show galaxies whose morphology looks "surprisingly similar" (my words after looking at the picture) to ours and those around us and those in our local cluster and super cluster. This is at the limit of the presently observable universe. That does not mean "at the edge"; it just means at our observational limits with what ewe've got up and working right now.Because the observed correlation of luminosity with redshift is due to the electrical stress rather than to the distance of the object, highly charged, nearby objects look like remote, high redshift supernovae that are too bright for their distance. One can imagine the theoretical problems that would result from that misinterpretation.
Oddly enough, despite the mathematics and symbology of logic, little of which I understand or have been exposed to in the one logic course I took in college, I subscribe to Terry Wiit's idea in Our Undiscovered Universe that, if he got nothing else in there right, we live in a singular universe, outside of which is Nothing (the Null Hypothesis as he charmingly states), and of which the antithesis is our subset of nothingness, reality: the universe we all know and love. No alternate universes; no colliding branes, no time travel. This is it, the Big Time. Based on that solid precept, all I can do is press on and keep investigating things as they are. It's lovely in its simplicity. We have everything we need right here: mass, energy, time. The total never changes. Our causative universe conserves everything within it - there is literally no place for it to go. Time did not start nor can it stop - it's not a clock. It's a zero-sum game, a friction-free Rube Goldberg device that cannot wind down or up. So, rather than mysticism or epistemological arguments, it is simpler to say we don't know it all yet, but let's stay sharp and give it a try. Each of us has one opportunity, one timeline, to do our best. Whether it's physics or theory or social work or tattooing, that's all we can do.
