© 1988 by British Society for the Philosophy of Science
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Zeeman-Göbel Topologies
Dept. of Philosophy, University of Adelaide Adelaide South Australia
In 1967 E. C. Zeeman argued that the Euclidean (i. e. manifold) topology of Minkowski space-time should be replaced by a strictly finer topology that was to have a closer connection with the indefinite metric. This proposal was extended in 1976 by Rudiger Göbel and Hawking, King and McCarthy to the space-times of General Relativity. It is the purpose of this paper to argue that these suggestions for replacement misrepresent the significance of the manifold topology and overstate the necessity for a finer topology. The motivation behind such arguments is a realist view of space-time topology as against (what can be construed to be) the instrumentalist position underlying some of the suggestions for replacement