Nagata's conjecture and countably compact hulls in generic extensions (Q2469574)

In 1970 Nagata conjectured that every \(M\)-space is homeomorphic to a closed subspace of the product of a countably compact space and a metric space. To attack this problem Morita introduced and studied the notion of countably-compactifiable spaces and proved that: An \(M\)-space satisfies Nagata's conjecture if and only if it is countably-compactifiable. Now, if we restrict ourselves to the case of first countable spaces, Burke and Van Douwen and independently Kato showed that there are normal, first countable \(M\)-spaces which are not countably-compactifiable, i.e., Nagata's conjecture was refuted. Moreover, Terada and Terasawa gave three first-countable spaces without maximal first-countable extensions. The author of this very interesting paper shows that there is a c.c.c.\ poset \(P\) of size \(2^\omega\) such that every first countable regular space from the ground model has a first countable countably compact regular extension in \(V^p\). Hence in \(V^p\), Nagata's conjecture holds for each first countable regular space from the ground model.