May 19
Miha Habič,
Bard College at Simon's Rock
Some old and new results on nonamalgamable forcing extensions
Fixing some countable transitive model $M$ of set theory, we can consider its generic multiverse, the family of all models obtainable from $M$ by taking any sequence of forcing extensions and ground models. There is an attractive similarity between the generic multiverse and the Turing degrees, but the multiverse has the drawback (or feature?) that it contains nonamalgamable models, that is, models with no common upper bound, as was observed by several people, going back to at least Mostowski. In joint work with Hamkins, Klausner, Verner, and Williams in 2019, we studied the order-theoretic properties of the generic multiverse and, among other results, gave a characterization of which partial orders embed nicely into the multiverse. I will present our results in the simplest case of Cohen forcing, as well as existing generalizations to wide forcing, and some new results on non-Cohen ccc forcings.