On the consistency of the Moore-Mrówka solution (Q1203825)

The author shows that large cardinal assumptions are not necessary to prove the consistency of seven recent PFA results of Balogh, Fremlin and Nyikos on countably compact spaces of countable tightness and closed preimages of \(\omega_ 1\). First, two technical properties of a countably compact space and of closed mappings onto \(\omega_ 1\) are extracted, and then the rest is shown to be a consequence of these conditions. Afterwards, these conditions are shown to be consistent. For this, consistency preservation properties of a forcing iteration should be guaranteed. A more sophisticated forcing technique is the main point to remove the need for large cardinals for this preservation. E.g., it is consistent with ZF that compact spaces of countable tightness are sequential.