 These difficulties for metrical essentialism arise from the fact that in general relativity space-time structure varies from one model, i.e., possible world, to another (Butterfield 1989: 16–27). We cannot leave points or regions to themselves to settle their internal relations, because general relativity denies the idea of a spatial-temporal framework whose make-up is settled independently of the matter or radiation. So there isn’t a stable once-and-for-all class of points or regions which once posited suffice for the purposes of modern physics, hence no stable class of truth-makers that suffice for making all the distance-duration claims true.