Some results on the Zeeman topology

Abstract

In a 1967 paper, Zeeman proposed a new topology for Minkowski spacetime, physically motivated but much more complicated than the standard one. Here a detailed study is given of some properties of the Zeeman topology which had not been considered at the time. The general setting refers to Minkowski spacetime of any dimension k+1. In the special case k=1, a full characterization is obtained for the compact subsets of spacetime; moreover, the first homotopy group is shown to be nontrivial.