this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] tomiant@piefed.social 3 points 18 hours ago (1 children)
[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 3 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

Idk if you can measure what area a hole takes up it has dimensions doesn't it?

[–] tomiant@piefed.social 2 points 2 hours ago

I’m being tongue in cheek of course and this is more a matter of philosophy and ontology than math and physics, but one could claim that the hole itself does not exist, it is the absence of matter, so what you are measuring is not the hole but rather the distance between any two points of matter. Otherwise one could point to nothing and claim that it is a hole of any size (like pointing to the sky and simply defining some part of it a hole of a certain size- it would effectively be a meaningless proposition in some sense).

But again, it is truly just silly semantics. :)

[–] PaintedSnail@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (2 children)

But can you measure something that doesn't exist? Can the absence of something be something in and of itself? Is it the hole you are measuring, or the object around the hole?

No but a void exists as defined by the matter around it

Yes we just did this

Both

Philosophy is easy