  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.
