ABSTRACT
The spacetime of GTR is very different; its geometry is variable, and affected by the presence and activities of material things. The strong form of Mach's Principle fails because the same mass distributions can occur in spacetime of different topologies. The failure of determinism is due to reasons of metaphysics rather than physics, which recall Leibniz's argument against Newton. The significance of 'the hole argument' a version of which dates back to Einstein was recognized by Stachel, and deployed against orthodox substantivalist interpretations of GTR by Earman and Norton. As Norton writes that the physical theory of relativistic cosmology is unable to pick between the two cases. General covariance is a desirable property for spacetime theories. The diffeomorphism leaves all assignments of matter to points outside the hole region unchanged, but alters the assignments within the hole; hence the transformation assigns different spatiotemporal locations to the material events occurring within the hole.
