English

The hole argument meets Noether's theorem

History and Philosophy of Physics 2024-03-19 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

The hole argument of general relativity threatens a radical and pernicious form of indeterminism. One natural response to the argument is that points belonging to different but isometric models should always be identified, or 'dragged-along', by the diffeomorphism that relates them. In this paper, I first criticise this response and its construal of isometry: it stumbles on certain cases, like Noether's second theorem. Then I go on to describe how the essential features of Einstein\rq{}s `point-coincidence' response to the hole argument avoid the criticisms of the `drag-along response' and are compatible with Noether's second theorem.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2403.10970,
  title  = {The hole argument meets Noether's theorem},
  author = {Henrique Gomes},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.10970},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

24 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2203.05339

R2 v1 2026-06-28T15:22:51.599Z