If there is a “worldly ordinal,” then must there be a worldly cardinal

model-theoryset-theory

A cardinal $\kappa$ is said to be worldly if $V_\kappa$ is a model of ZFC. Let us (potentially) generalize this by saying an ordinal $\alpha$ is worldly if $V_\alpha$ is a model of ZFC. The existence of a worldly ordinal implies the existence of a transitive model of ZFC, hence a countable ordinal $\alpha$ such that $L_\alpha$ is a model of ZFC. But I'm not sure in that case if there must then be a worldly cardinal.

My questions are as follows.

  1. Does ZFC prove that, if there is a worldly ordinal, then there is a worldly cardinal?
  2. Does ZFC prove that every worldly ordinal is a (worldly) cardinal?
  3. If not, is it consistent with ZFC that every worldly ordinal is a cardinal?

Hopefully it's my last set theory question for a while. 🙂

Best Answer

If $V_\alpha$ is a model of ZFC, then $\alpha$ must be a cardinal, and much more. In fact it must be a strong limit cardinal, a $\beth$-fixed point, a fixed point in the enumeration of $\beth$-fixed points, and have any other strong limit property of this sort.

To see this, observe that ZFC proves that the $\beth$-hierarchy is unbounded, but also we can show that the $\beth$ hierarchy (and the Von-Neumann hierarchy) is absolute for a "full" model of the form $V_\alpha,$ since the model's power set operator is the same as the real one. So it follows that $\alpha$ is a strong limit. And the stronger properties follow from similar considerations.

In a little more detail, if $\beta <\alpha,$ then $P(\beta) \in V_\alpha$ since $P(\beta)$ is just two ranks higher than $\beta,$ and so since being a subset is absolute, $P(\beta)^{V_\alpha}=P(\beta).$ ZFC proves $2^{|\beta|}$ exists, which relativized to $V_\alpha$ is the least ordinal in $V_\alpha$ that has a bijection in $V_\alpha$ with $P(\beta).$ And being a bijection is absolute so this is a real bijection, thus there is an ordinal in $V_\alpha$ that is in one-to-one correspondence with $P(\beta),$ so $2^{|\beta|}<\alpha.$

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