A measurable cardinal with a nonwellfounded ultrapower

Abstract

The usefulness of measurable cardinals in set theory arises in good part from the fact that an ultraproduct of wellfounded structures by a countably complete ultrafilter is wellfounded. In the standard proof of the wellfoundedness of such an ultraproduct, one first shows, without any use of the axiom of choice, that the ultraproduct contains no infinite descending chains. One then completes the proof by noting that, assuming the axiom of choice, any partial ordering with no infinite descending chain is wellfounded. In fact, the axiom of dependent choices (a weakened form of the axiom of choice) suffices. It is therefore of interest to ask whether some use of the axiom of choice is needed in order to prove the wellfoundedness of such ultraproducts or whether, on the other hand, their wellfoundedness can be proved in ZF alone. In Theorem 1, we show that the axiom of choice is needed for the proof (assuming the consistency of a strong partition relation). Theorem 1 also contains some related consistency results concerning infinite exponent partition relations. We then use Theorem 1 to show how to change the cofinality of a cardinal κ satisfying certain partition relations to any regular cardinal less than κ, while introducing no new bounded subsets of κ. This generalizes a theorem of Prikry [5].