  Orientability is an important topological property of spacetime manifolds. It
is generally assumed that a test for spatial orientability requires a journey
across the whole 3-space to check for orientation-reversing paths. Since such a
global expedition is not feasible, theoretical arguments that combine
universality of physical experiments with local arrow of time, CP violation and
CPT invariance are offered to support the choosing of time- and
space-orientable spacetime manifolds. We show that it is possible to access
spatial orientability of Minkowski spacetime through local physical effects
involving quantum electromagnetic fluctuations. To this end, we study the
motions of a charged particle and an electric dipole under these fluctuations
in Minkowski spacetime with orientable and non-orientable spatial topologies.
We derive expressions for an orientability indicator for both point-like
particles in two spatially flat topologies. For the particle, we show that it
is possible to distinguish the orientable from the non-orientable topology by
contrasting the evolution of the indicators. This shows that it is possible to
access orientability through electromagnetic quantum fluctuations.The answer to
the question on how to locally probe the orientability of Minkowski 3-space
intrinsically arises in the study of the dipole's motions. We find that a
characteristic inversion pattern exhibited by the dipole indicator curves is a
signature of non-orientability. This result makes it clear that it is possible
to locally unveil spatial non-orientability by the inversion pattern of
orientability indicator curves of an electric dipole under electromagnetic
fluctuations. Our findings open the way to a conceivable experiment involving
quantum electromagnetic fluctuations to locally probe the spatial orientability
on the microscopic scale of Minkowski spacetime.
