Even with terrestrial applications that have very low clock skew, it can be very helpful to have a notion of which events could be effected by previous events a

Even with terrestrial applications that have very low clock skew, it can be very helpful to have a notion of which events could be effected by previous events and which couldn't have. But you're bang on the money with the physics analogy. Lamport himself says that his knowledge of special relativity helped him come up with the concept. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfRouGH0oMg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfRouGH0oMg