The Rich Structure of Minkowski Space

Understand

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.
• This will contain elementary aspects of affine spaces, various paths to the Poincare group, the lattices of causally and chronologically complete regions, and last but not least, the Noether-Herglotz theorem.