In general relativity, the hole argument is an apparent paradox that much troubled Albert Einstein while developing his famous field equation.
Some philosophers of physics take the argument to raise a problem for manifold substantialism, a doctrine that the manifold of events in spacetime are a "substance" which exists independently of the matter within it. Other philosophers and physicists disagree with this interpretation, and view the argument as a confusion about gauge invariance and gauge fixing instead.
Read more about Hole Argument: Einstein's Hole Argument, Meaning of Coordinate Invariance, Einstein's Resolution
Famous quotes containing the words hole and/or argument:
“I see the horses and the sad streets
Of my childhood in an agate eye
Roving, under the clean sheets,
Over a black hole in the sky.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“Argument is conclusive ... but ... it does not remove doubt, so that the mind may rest in the sure knowledge of the truth, unless it finds it by the method of experiment.... For if any man who never saw fire proved by satisfactory arguments that fire burns ... his hearer’s mind would never be satisfied, nor would he avoid the fire until he put his hand in it ... that he might learn by experiment what argument taught.”
—Roger Bacon (c. 1214–1294)