A time-flat condition on spacelike 2-surfaces in spacetime is considered here. This condition is analogous to constant torsion condition for curves in three dimensional space and has been studied in [2, 4, 5, 12, 13]. In particular, any 2-surface in a static slice of a static spacetime is time-flat. In this article, we address the question in the title and prove several local and global rigidity theorems for such surfaces in the Minkowski spacetime.

We prove the Poisson geometric version of the Local Reeb Stability (from foliation theory) and of the Slice Theorem (from equivariant geometry), which is also a generalization of Conn’s linearization theorem.

We prove that there exists uncountably many pairwise disjoint open subsets of the Gelfand space of the measure algebra on any locally compact non-discrete abelian group which shows that this space is not separable (in fact, we prove this assertion for the ideal $M_{0}(G)$ consisting of measures with Fourier-Stieltjes transforms vanishing at infinity which is a stronger statement). As a corollary, we obtain that the spectras of elements in the algebra of measures cannot be recovered from the image of one countable subset of the Gelfand space under Gelfand transform, common for all elements in the algebra.

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In [W], Witten considered the indices of elliptic operators on the free loop space CM of a spin manifold M. In particular the index of the formal signature operator on the loop space is exactly the elliptic genus of Landweber-Stong-Ochanine [LS],[O]. Motivated by physics, Witten made the conjectures about the rigidity of these elliptic operators which say that their 51-equivariant indices on M are independent of g G Sl. See [L] for the early history of the subject.