By usual accounts of gunk, such as Alfred Tarski's in 1929,[4] three-dimensional gunky objects also do not have other degenerate parts shaped like one-dimensional curves or two-dimensional surfaces.
But, as Sider argues, because gunk is both conceivable and possible, nihilism is false, or at best a contingent truth.
[5] Gunk has also played an important role in the history of topology[6] in recent debates concerning change, contact, and the structure of physical space.
Aristotle's solution to Zeno's paradoxes involves the idea that time is not made out of durationless instants, but ever smaller temporal intervals.
Despite having been a relatively common position in metaphysics, after Cantor's discovery of the distinction between denumerable and non-denumerable infinite cardinalities, and mathematical work by Adolf Grünbaum, gunk theory was no longer seen as a necessary alternative to a topology of space made out of points.
[9][10] Possibly the most influential formulation of a theory of gunky spacetime comes from A. N. Whitehead in his seminal work Process and Reality.
Under a Whiteheadian conception of spacetime, points, lines, planes, and other less-than-three-dimensional objects are constructed out of a method of "extensive abstraction", in which points, lines, and planes are identified with infinitely converging abstract sets of nested extended regions.
[11] Ted Sider has argued that even the possibility of gunk undermines another position, that of mereological nihilism.
Sider defends premise #1 by appealing to the fact that since nihilism is a metaphysical thesis, it must be true or false of necessity.