Can we settle this: how many holes does a straw have?
Can we settle this: how many holes does a straw have?
At work we somehow landed on the topic of how many holes a human has, which then evolved into a heated discussion on the classic question of how many holes does a straw have.
I think it's two, but some people are convinced that it's one, which I just don't understand. What are your thoughts?
Mathematically It's one. Think of a disk, like a CD, does it have one hole or two? One, right? Now imagine you can make it thicker, I.e. increase the height, and then reduce the outer radius... Making it progressively more straw-like. At what point does it stop having 1 hole and begin to have 2?
Topologically they're the same shape.
I'm sure Matt Parker has a video on this topic in YouTube. Here
One of course, what a weird conversation to have.
1 'hole' if you can call it that. Imagine if the straw started life as a solid cylinder and you had to bore out the inside to turn it into a straw: if that were the case, you would drill 1 hole all the way through it.
Another analogy is a donut. Would you agree that a donut has just 1 hole? I would say yes. Now stretch that donut vertically untill you have a giant cylinder with a hole in the middle. That's basically now just a straw. The fact you stretched it doesn't increase the number of holes it has.
Poop. Beans. Here come the holes.
One
Its one
One long hole that goes all the way through the straw
It contains one hole. While it appears to have two holes, if both are closed, you get a hollow sphere, which has -1 hole.
Define a "hole".
Hopefully none, it won't work well if there are holes.
One common definition of a hole defines a hole specifically as the opening. If the definition applies only to the opening, this implies that the hole exists on a 2-dimensional plane. Despite the fact that the openings are connected along a tunnel, we don't care about the structure of a hole beyond the 'opening', we can ignore everything else. If we continue on that path, there are 2 visible holes on a straw.
Physically or Metaphysically?
Relevant background music for your pondering. Fitting background music while you ponder
I can't wait for Super AI to help humankind resolve these existential issues once and for all.
Relevant Vsauce video https://youtu.be/egEraZP9yXQ
By the logic of most of the comments in here, does this mean most people are wrong when they say they are digging a hole???
Judging by what this video by Vsauce about how many holes a human has it should be one in a straw. A straw is basically just a long doughnut and there's one hole in those.
Well, depends what you call a hole. Does a glass have a hole? Does a bottle have a hole?
If you said no to both, you mean a topological hole and a straw has one.
If you said yes to one or both of them, you mean a tight opening in which someting can be inserted (yes yes, innuendo). How tight an opening must be to be a hole is arbitrary and subjective, it depends on the person. In this case a straw has two holes.
None. Colloquially, we use "hole" in all kinds of weird ways. As others have pointed out, topologically a straw is no different to a torus (donut) that clearly has one "hole"... but I'd like to focus instead on the linguistic definition of "hole", not the colloquial or mathematic definitions.
A hole can either mean:
- a perforation ("a hole in my shirt", "a bullet hole", etc) - which is, specifically, "a hole or pattern made by or as if by piercing or boring"
- a gap ("a hole in your reasoning", "a hole in my heart", etc)
- a hollowed out or burrowed place ("a hole in the road", "a fox hole", etc)
i think we're not talking about 2. It seems to require some larger uniform structure or set of items in which an item is missing. 1 and 3 seem really similar to me: both seem to require some active removal of matter to qualify. All of these definitions point towards a subtractive process, where something of a larger whole (heh) is removed or absent.
Most straws, I'll venture a guess, are not manufactured solid and then bored out.. so I don't think it applies here. So I don't think a straw matches a fitting definition of "hole". A straw is created additively by assembling the "shell" by some means, not subtractively. Donuts, by comparison, had holes punched in them. A subtractive operation. Rubber bands have not had holes punched in them... they're additive. Not holes.
Similarly (because I see a lot of talk about buttholes and mouths here too), your esophagus and digestive tract (and veins and all kinds of other things) were formed in a similar additive manner, not by forming a mass of meat and boring through the passage, and thus would similarly not qualify as "holes" (in my opinion).
Matt Parker did quite a good video on this exact question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymF1bp-qrjU
I think this depends on the semantic basis one uses for "hole".
1 hole: One might say there is a single hole in a straw. The logic there is that the straw is a cylinder, so the inner surface at the top is a part of the same surface at the bottom. In that sense, a hole itself is a kind of cylinder with a single connected surface. But this could be taken as problematic, since the same argument means that the straw itself is a hole, or at least that it is made up entirely of the exact same things a hole must have, and nothing else.
2 holes: Where that fails is if one instead assumes the more abstract sense of "hole". Consider the straw as a vessel with a volume -- with both ends plugged, it holds a substance. One can unplug either end and argue that it is a hole since the substance within is now open to the outside by way of that hole. In that sense, there are two abstract holes in a straw (abstract because the connection between both holes is ignored -- neither hole is taken to have any depth -- and each hole is an absence of material). Of course, due to physics, unplugging one end of the straw does not release the substance within if the other end is still plugged, but that holds no consequences for the logic of hole-as-absence-of-material.
0 holes: The argument could go further. One could try and solve this by considering other objects and how we think about "hole" in those contexts.
How many holes are in a bucket? If it's a perfectly undamaged bucket, people would likely be arguing between two different values: in one sense, the bucket has a single hole, because there is an opening at the top. However, using the same logic that straws have a single hole, the bucket in fact is made of its hole, and it seems silly to say the bucket itself is a hole.
If one goes with hole-as-absence-of-material, then there's a single hole in an undamaged bucket, but the bucket isn't made up of hole.
Further still, one might argue instead that an undamaged bucket has no holes. Why? Because a liquid in such a bucket will not leak out of anywhere. The bucket is effectively a round piece of material formed into a shape, and that material itself contains no holes in an undamaged bucket.
Using that logic with the straw, an undamaged straw might actually be claimed to have no holes -- but how? We've all likely used a straw that was bent or damaged and is less useful as a straw because pressure escapes from somewhere between the ends. Such a straw could be said to have a hole in it. There, "hole" has some aspect of brokenness being taken as part of its meaning. If the pressure-vessel part of the straw functions correctly, then it has no holes.
In popular culture: Consider the following lyric from Funkadelic: "What is a pipe but a pole with a hole in it? A pole is a pipe with no hole in it."
There, the band has clearly relied on the 1-hole analysis of a pipe (taken to be relevant to the straw discussion since it seems uncontroversial to claim that a straw is a small pipe). Had they said "no holes in it", the suggestion would have been that the band agrees with the abstract hole-as-absence-of-material sense. Similarly, it does not appear that the band thinks there are no holes in a pipe; in fact, that would be directly contradictory to their statement. But no logic is given directly for that choice in the song; one must extrapolate their position by context.
tl;dr A straw could be taken to have 0, 1, or 2 holes in it depending on the semantic sense of "hole" one selects. I need to think about this more like I need a hole in the head, but I also don't know how many of those I have.