The Rich Structure of Minkowski Space

Minkowski Space is the simplest four-dimensional Lorentzian Manifold, being topologically trivial and globally flat, and hence the simplest model of spacetime—from a General-Relativistic point of view. But this does not mean that it is altogether structurally trivial. In fact, it has a very rich structure, parts of which will be spelled out in detail in this contribution, which is written for Minkowski Spacetime: A Hundred Years Later, edited by Vesselin Petkov, to appear in 2008 in the Springer Series on Fundamental Theories of Physics, Springer Verlag, Berlin.