Embeddability properties of countable metric spaces (Q1767720)

For subspaces \(X\) and \(Y\) of the rationals \(\mathbb Q\) the notation \(X\leq_h Y\) means that \(X\) is homeomorphic to a subspace of \(Y\) and \(X\sim Y\) means \(X\leq_h Y\leq_hX.\) The resulting set \({\mathcal P}(\mathbb Q)/\!\sim\) of equivalence classes \(\overline X=\{Y\subseteq \mathbb Q:Y\sim X\}\) is partially-ordered by the relation \(\overline X\leq_h\overline Y\) if \(X\leq_h Y.\) It is shown that \(({\mathcal P}(\mathbb Q)/\!\!\!\sim,\leq_h)\) has cardinality \(\aleph_1\) and that \(\overline{\mathbb Q}\) is the only element in this partially ordered set with uncountably many elements less than it. Furthermore \(({\mathcal P}(\mathbb Q)/\!\!\!\sim,\leq_h)\) is partially well-ordered in the sense that it lacks infinite anti-chains and infinite strictly descending chains. Indeed \(({\mathcal P}(\mathbb Q)/\!\!\!\sim,\leq_h)\) is described with the help of scattered subspaces of \(\mathbb Q\) with finite Cantor-Bendixson rank and several results relating Cantor-Bendixson rank to this embeddability ordering are proved. These results are obtained by investigating a local homeomorphism invariant (which the author calls type and which captures the local embeddability properties of points) for countable scattered metric spaces.