I’ve recently found two slick new proofs of some of my prior results on indestructibility, using the idea of an observation of Arthur Apter’s. What he had noted is:
Observation. (Apter [1]) If
Proof. The continuum coding axiom asserts that every set of ordinals is coded into the GCH pattern (it follows that they are each coded unboundedly often). If
First, what I noticed is that this immediately implies that small forcing ruins indestructibility:
Theorem. (Hamkins, Shelah [2], Hamkins [3]) After any nontrivial forcing of size less than
Proof. Nontrivial small forcing
This argument can be seen as essentially related to Shelah’s 1998 argument, given in [2].
Second, I also noticed that a similar idea can be used to prove:
Theorem. (Bagaria, Hamkins, Tsaprounis, Usuba [4]) Superstrong and other large cardinals are never Laver indestructible.
Proof. Suppose the superstrongness of
The argument shows that even the
I would note, however, that the slick proof does not achieve the stronger result of [4], which is that superstrongness is never indestructible even by
[1] Arthur W. Apter and Shoshana Friedman. HOD-supercompactness, inestructibility, and level-by-level equivalence, to appear in Bulletin of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Mathematics).
[2] Joel David Hamkins, Saharon Shelah, Superdestructibility: A Dual to Laver’s Indestructibility, J. Symbolic Logic, Volume 63, Issue 2 (1998), 549-554.
[3] Joel David Hamkins, Small forcing makes any cardinal superdestructible, J. Symbolic Logic, 63 (1998).
[4] Joan Bagaria, Joel David Hamkins, Konstantinos Tsaprounis, Toshimichi Usuba, Superstrong and other large cardinals are never Laver indestructible, to appear in the Archive of Math Logic (special issue in memory of Richard Laver).
The arguments are nice and short. Thank you for posting them.
Joel, these are really very pretty arguments! Indestructible strongly unfoldable cardinals also have the property that satisfies CCA right?
Thanks very much! And yes, essentially the same argument works with strongly unfoldable. All you need is indestructible -extendible, which is really very weak, weaker than -reflecting, since you don’t need to reflect arbitrarily high, but only a little, since the coding can be done right away above .
That’s nice!
Now I know that indestructible supercompact cardinals have GCH fail as weirdly as possible below them. (So in particular if we assume that is supercompact and GCH holds, it is not indestructible!)
Thanks!
That’s right, but meanwhile there is an analogue of the Laver preparation that makes the supercompactness of indestructible by all -directed closed GCH-preserving forcing, with full GCH. See my paper “Destruction or preservation as you like it” http://jdh.hamkins.org/asyoulikeit/.
Joel, that’s an interesting situation then. We can have either “everything” in the continuum below , or nothing at all. Is it also generalizable to fix any pattern of the continuum and then the indestructibility is with regards to -directed closed forcings which preserve these patterns everywhere.
Or something like that…
That’s right, and that is what the “As you like it” phrase was meant to evoke. You can make the supercompactness of kappa indestructible by whatever class of directed closed you can define in a local manner, and this also allows you to cause certain patterns in the GCH holding or failing, etc.