Does a Straw Have
One Hole or Two?
The 23-year debate ends here.
Everyone's choosing.
Are you in?
ONE | OR | TWO
The 23-year debate ends here.
Everyone's choosing.
Are you in?
The Core Question: Is a straw a long donut (One Hole) or a pipe with two distinct ends (Two Holes)? This has divided families, physics departments, and the internet since 2014.
It's a long donut. Topologically, a straw is equivalent to a torus. Stretching a ring doesn't create a second hole. If you have a hole in your shirt, does it have an entrance and an exit? No, it's just one hole. Do the math.
One way in. One way out. If I cover one hole with my thumb, the other still exists. If it was one hole, blocking one end would block the other. A tunnel has two openings. Therefore, two holes.
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Formally, a straw is homeomorphic to an open cylinder: a genus-1 surface equivalent to a torus. In topology, a torus has precisely one hole. Stretching a ring along its axis does not introduce a second topological feature. The “one hole” position follows directly from this classification.
Informally, a hole requires an entrance and an exit to satisfy its functional definition. A straw provides two distinct openings through which matter passes. Blocking either end collapses the functional pathway. This mirrors the tunnel model: two mouths, one passage, two holes.
The conflict is not empirical but ontological. Both positions are internally consistent under different definitions of “hole.” The debate was formally documented in academic philosophy by David Lewis and Stephanie Lewis in their 1970 paper Holes (Australian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 48), which remains the canonical reference on the metaphysics of hollow objects.