Talk:Hole argument

message: The second paragraph, "It is incorrectly interpreted by some philosophers ..." seems pretty blatantly non-neutral. There's a serious ongoing scholarly debate about this interpretation. See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-holearg/ for general discussion. I'm new around here, but I hope it's ok to go ahead and tweak it. --Jefelino (talk) 15:21, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Neutrality

message: User:129.10.210.52, I just noticed that the paragraphs you inserted into the tiny stuby I wrote were
lifted verbatim from one of the articles by Norton which I cited.  In future, please don't do that.  We gave the citation so that interested readers could go read what Norton has to say, not so that someone could plagiarize from the article!  Sheesh.---CH 03:37, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Fer gosh sakes, don't plagiarize!

message: I was planning to expland this stub in a very different way (focusing on explicit  to illustrate the idea of the hole problem more concretely, and relating this to the fundamental local isometry problem solved by Ricci and later more elegaantly by Élie Cartan).  Haven't had a chance to read Ian's version, but just noticed that he used figures he grabbed from a paper Rovelli--- this would be an image copyright violation so they were autoremoved.  Ian, can you draw your own figures and upload these? ---CH 04:35, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: New version by [[User:Ian Beynon]]

message: "WHATEVER IS NEVER AND NOWHERE IS NOT:. SPACE, TIME, AND ONTOLOGY IN CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM GRAVITY. by. Gordon Belot. B.Sc., University of Toronto, 1991"  Is this published?  We don't want to cite an undergraduate class essay or something like that! ---CH 10:05, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Odd Citation

message: I had been monitoring this for bad edits (although I never did get around to trying to fact check the extensive rewrite by another user), but I am leaving the WP and am now abandoning this article to its fate.
I emphatically do not vouch for anything you might see in more recent versions, although I hope for the best.
Good luck to all students in your search for information, regardless!---CH 00:48, 1 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Students beware

message: Having edited this article, I wanted to clarify some historical points which I do not
have the patience to substantiate with references and write about properly, but which
explain the context. Einstein's hole argument sounds completely absurd to a modern
geometer, since it confuses the form that the metric takes in different coordinate systems
with the actual physical situation described by the metric. The question then arises, how
did Einstein come to make such a blunder?
I believe that the reason is that Einstein always had a physical interpretation in mind
when he talked about a coordinate system. A system of coordinates for him is a collection
of observers on a grid of points making measurements. The coordinate system, as Einstein
tends to interpret it, is then part of the physical description of a situation--- it is
the location of all the metersticks and clocks which are performing the measurments. It
is not just a contrivance for giving a mathematical form to a metric.
Taking this perspective, it is natural that one could get confused about the fact that
different coordinate systems, interpreted as "different" configurations of clocks and
metersticks, could give different answers as to the form of the metric. The resolution
would require that the different configurations of clocks and metersticks give the same
answer as to the nature of all the relations between the physical objects whose positions
they measure. This point of view explains why Einstein uses the language of relational
space-time--- that the relations between objects is all that is important--- when resolving
this paradox. The modern point of view, which does not give the coordinate system any
physical significance at all, makes the resolution of the paradox apparent. Indeed, it
is hard to even clearly state the paradox in a modern language. This is why I think it
is best to stick with Einstein's original examples.
I can give some evidence for this point of view regarding Einstein's perspective toward
coordinate systems from his other work on the general theory. When Einstein discusses
the conservation of energy and momentum in General Relativity in 1917 or thereabouts,
he constructs an explicitly coordinate dependent Pseudo-tensor. Everyone else who was
active in relativity (Weyl and Schroedinger among others) criticized Einstein on the
grounds that the coordinate system could not possibly take part in defining such a
physical quantity as the energy, but Einstein felt that the dependence on coordinates
was only natural, given that the gravitational field was localized at different places
depending on the state of motion of the observers. This is again a physical point of
view which interprets the coordinate system as a collection of observers.
It is also possible, in my view, although again I have no substantiation, that the absurd
confusion between coordinate systems evident in the "hole paradox" paper is what led Hilbert
to say that "Every Kindergardener knows more about four dimensional geometry than Einstein,
yet it is Einstein who is doing the work (of constructing General Relativity)".
: This observation is likely false, because Hilbert makes a variant of the same hole argument in an early draft of his paper on General Relativity. Looks like he's aping Einstein.Likebox (talk) 06:58, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Some Historical Comments of Uncertain Accuracy 

message: There are problems with the new stuff--- the example which starts everything off is severely misleading. The two equations mentioned are not coordinate transformations of each other, they are textual transformations of each other. They are the same equation.
For a good example, use
:
{dx \over dt} = -x^3
vs.
:
{3y^2 dy \over dt} = - y^9
which are equivalent by a change of variables.
The discussion of passive/active transformations is one of those things that authors introduce to clarify, but which bugs me personally. I think Einstein's way of stating things is better, but best of all is to clarify everything with gauge theory first.Likebox (talk) 08:45, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Problems With The New Stuff 

message: Yep, they are not related by a coordinate transformation - that's the whole point!!  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ibayn (talk • contribs) 06:44, 22 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  No Problems 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Isn't the stance that spacetime exists independently of the metric defined on it typically referred to as "substantivalism" and not "substantialism"? It looks like some do refer to this is as "substantialism", but most sources use the other term: "substantivilism." This includes Earman's original paper on the hole argument.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by MathyPhys (talk • contribs) 10:37, 22 March 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Substantivalism vs Substantialism