Many weak P-sets (Q2105046)

Problem 219 in [\textit{J. van Mill} (ed.) and \textit{G. M. Reed} (ed.), Open problems in topology. Amsterdam etc.: North-Holland (1990; Zbl 0718.54001)] asks for a non-trivial copy of \(\omega^*\) inside \(\omega^*\). Here \(\omega^*\) is the remainder in \(\beta\omega\), the Čech-Stone compactification of the discrete space \(\omega\). There are many embeddedings of \(\beta\omega\) into \(\omega^*\) and hence many copies of \(\omega^*\) itself in \(\omega^*\), and the problem asks for a copy \textit{not} of this form. In [Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 142, No. 8, 2907--2913 (2014; Zbl 1309.54002)] the first-named author constructed such a copy and the present paper strengthens this result to a copy that is even a weak P-set: a set \(A\) such that \(\overline C\cap A=\emptyset\) whenever \(C\) is a countable subset of \(\omega^*\) disjoint from \(A\). The earlier example satisfies this condition for countable sets that are \textit{relatively discrete}. The authors survey the history of the problem and then proceed to construct their example in two steps: first they prove that every compact space of weight \(\mathfrak{c}\) or less is the irreducible continuous image of a closed \(\mathfrak{c}\)-OK set of \(\omega^*\). The latter property is a considerable technical strengthening of the weak P-set property. The second step is to embed \(\omega^*\) as a weak P-set in the Stone space \(K\) of the measure algebra of \(\{0,1\}^{\omega_1}\). The paper brings together various techniques developed originally for quite disparate problems and offers a good introduction to these.