2011 seminar talk: Conjectures of Rado and Chang and Special $\aleph_2$-Aronszajn trees
Talk held by Victor Torres (KGRC)
at the KGRC seminar on 2011-04-14.
Abstract
We recall that Rado's Conjecture (RC) is the statement that every tree
T that is not decomposable into countably many antichains contains a
subtree of cardinality \(\aleph_1\) with the same property.
Todorcevic has shown the consistency of this statement relative to
the consistency of the existence of a strongly compact cardinal.
Moreover he has shown that RC is consistent with CH as well as
consistent with the negation of CH. Also, he has shown that RC has
many interesting consequences, including the continuum is at most
\(\aleph_2\), CC, SCH, the negation of \(\Box_\kappa\) for all
\(\kappa > \omega\), etc.
This result is the first in the series which will study the effect of
RC or one of its consequences to weaker form of square sequences. We
will show that Jensen's weak square principle \(\Box_{\omega_1}^*\) is
equivalent to CH if we assume either Rado's conjecture or its
consequence, the strong Chang's Conjecture.