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20 - The Transfinite Universe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2011

W. Hugh Woodin
Affiliation:
University of California
Matthias Baaz
Affiliation:
Technische Universität Wien, Austria
Christos H. Papadimitriou
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Hilary W. Putnam
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Dana S. Scott
Affiliation:
Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania
Charles L. Harper, Jr
Affiliation:
Vision-Five.com Consulting, United States
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Summary

The twentieth-century choice for the axioms of set theory are the Zermelo-Frankel axioms together with the axiom of choice; these are the ZFC axioms. This particular choice has led to a twenty-first-century problem:

The ZFC Dilemma: Many of the fundamental questions of set theory are formally unsolvable from the ZFC axioms.

Perhaps the most famous example is given by the problem of the continuum hypothesis: suppose X is an infinite set of real numbers; must it be the case that either X is countable or that the set X has cardinality equal to the cardinality of the set of all real numbers?

One interpretation of this development is as follows:

Skeptic's Attack: The continuum hypothesis is neither true nor false because the entire conception of the universe of sets is a complete fiction. Furthermore, all the theorems of set theory are merely finitistic truths, a reflection of the mathematician and not of any genuine mathematical “reality.”

Here and in what follows, the “Skeptic” simply refers to the metamathematical position that denies any genuine meaning to a conception of uncountable sets. The counterview is that of the “Set Theorist”:

The Set Theorist's Response: The development of set theory, after Cohen, has led to the realization that formally unsolvable problems have degrees of unsolvability that can be calibrated by large cardinal axioms.

Elaborating further, as a consequence of this calibration, it has been discovered that in many cases, very different lines of investigation have led to problems whose degree of unsolvability is the same.

Type
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Kurt Gödel and the Foundations of Mathematics
Horizons of Truth
, pp. 449 - 472
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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