For the first lecture, see here.
II
In this lecture, we prove:
Universality Theorem. If
is a weak extender model for
is supercompact’, and
is elementary with
, then
.
As mentioned before, this gives us that absorbs a significant amount of strength from
. For example:
Lemma. Suppose that
is 2-huge. Then, for each
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There is a proper class of huge cardinals witnessed by embeddings that cohere
.
Hence, if and
, then
There is a proper class of huge cardinals.
Here, coherence means the following: coheres a set
iff, letting
, we have
and
. Actually, we need much less. We need something like
and for hugeness,
already suffices.
This methodology breaks down past -hugeness. Then we need to change the notion of coherence, since (for example, beginning with
) to have
is no longer a reasonable condition. But suitable modifications still work at this very high level.
The proof of the universality theorem builds on a reformulation of supercompactness in terms of extenders, due to Magidor:
Theorem (Magidor). The following are equivalent:
is supercompact.
- For all
and all
, there are
and
, and an elementary
such that:
and
.
and
.
The proof is actually a straightforward reflection argument.
Proof. Suppose that item 2. fails, as witnessed by
. Pick a normal fine
on
where
, and consider
.
Then ,
, and
. But then
, and, by elementarity,
are counterexamples to item 2. in
with respect to
. However,
, and it witnesses item 2. in
for
with respect to
. Contradiction.
Assume item 2. For any
we need to find a normal fine
on
. Fix
, and let
and
. Let
be an embedding as in item 2. for
. Use
to define a normal fine
on
by
iff
.
Note that , so this definition makes sense. Further,
, so
. Hence,
is in the domain of
, and
is as wanted.
As mentioned in the previous lecture, it was expected for a while that Magidor’s reformulation would be the key to the construction of inner models for supercompactness, since it suggests which extenders need to be put in their sequence. Recent results indicate now that the construction should instead proceed directly with extenders derived from the normal fine measures. However, Magidor’s reformulation is very useful for the theory of weak extender models, thanks to the following fact, that can be seen as a strengthening of this reformulation:
Lemma. Suppose
is a weak extender model for `
is supercompact’. Suppose
and
. Then there are
in
and an elementary
such that:
,
,
, and
.
.
.
Again, the proof is a reflection argument as in Magidor’s theorem, but we need to work harder to ensure items 2. and 3. The key is:
Claim. Suppose
. Then there is a normal fine
on
such that
The transitive collapse of
is
, where
is the transitive collapse of
.
Proof. We may assume that and that this also holds in
. In
, pick a bijection
between
and
, and find
on
with
and
.
It is enough to check
The transitive collapse of
is a rank initial segment of
.
Once we have , it is easy to use the bijection between
and
to obtain the desired measure
.
To prove , work in
, and note that the result is now trivial since, letting
be the ultrapower embedding induced by the restriction of
to
, we have that
collapses to
, which is an initial segment of
.
Proof of the lemma. The argument is now a straightforward elaboration of the proof of Magidor’s theorem, using the claim just established. Namely, in the proof of of the Theorem, use an ultrafilter
as in the claim. We need to see that (the restriction to
of) the ultrapower embedding
satisfies
. We begin with
much larger than
such that
, and fix sets
such that
, and a bijection
such that
is a bijection between
and
and
.
We use to transfer
to a measure
on
concentrating on
. Now let
be the ultrapower embedding. We need to check that
. The issue is that, in principle,
could overspill and be larger. However, since
concentrates on
, this is not possible, because transitive collapses are computed the same way in
,
, and
, even though
may differ from
.
We are ready for the main result of this lecture.
Proof of the Universality Theorem. We will actually prove that for all cardinals , if
is elementary, and , then
.
This gives the result as stated, through some coding.
Choose much larger than
, and let
. Apply the strengthened Magidor reformulation, to obtain
,
and
, and an embedding
with ,
,
, and
.
Note that .
It is enough to show that , since
, and so
as well.
For this, we actually only need to show that , since the fragment
of
determines
completely. The advantage, of course, is that it is easier to analyze sets of ordinals.
Let with
, and let
. We need to compute in
whether
. For this, note that
iff
.
Now, , so this reduces to
, i.e., to compute
, it suffices to know
.
Recall that , and consider
. Note that
, and
. Applying
to
, and using elementarity, we have
.
But because
, while
.
It follows that . Since
, we have
(simply note the range of
), and we are done, because we have reduced the question of whether
to the question of whether
, which
can determine.
Note how the Universality Theorem suggests that the construction of models for supercompactness using Magidor’s reformulation runs into difficulties; namely, if
is supercompact, we have many extenders
with critical point
and
, and we are now producing new extenders above
, that should somehow also be accounted for in
.
A nice application of universality is the dichotomy theorem for mentioned at the end of last lecture. If
is a weak extender model for supercompactness, we obtain the following:
Corollary. There is no sequence of (non-trivial) elementary embeddings
with well-founded limit.
It follows that there is a -definable ordinal such that any embedding fixing this ordinal is the identity! This is because
where
is the
-theory in
of the ordinals.
In particular, there is no . Note that the corollary and this fact fail if
is replaced by an arbitrary weak extender model.
The question of whether there can actually be embeddings in a sense is still open, i.e., its consistency has currently only been established from the assumption in
that there are very strong versions of Reinhardt cardinals, i.e., strong versions of embeddings
, the consistency of which is in itself problematic.
(On the other hand, Hugh has shown that there are no embeddings , and this can be established by an easy variant of Hugh’s proof of Kunen’s theorem as presented, for example, in Kanamori’s book (Second proof of Theorem 23.12).)
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