Twin paradox and space topology

Abstract

If space is compact, then a traveller twin can leave Earth, travel back home without changing direction and find her sedentary twin older than herself. We show that the asymmetry between their spacetime trajectories lies in a topological invariant of their spatial geodesics, namely the homotopy class. This illustrates how the spacetime symmetry invariance group, although valid {\it locally}, is broken down {\it globally} as soon as some points of space are identified. As a consequence, any non--trivial space topology defines preferred inertial frames along which the proper time is longer than along any other one.