A counterexample to a strengthening of a question of V. D. Milman (Q6093070)

Let \(\langle \cdot, \cdot \rangle\) and \(|\cdot|\) be the standard inner product and the corresponding Euclidean norm on \(\mathbb{R}^n \) respectively, \( \|\cdot\|\) be another norm on \(\mathbb{R}^n \), and \(\alpha > 0\). A subspace \(Y\) of the normed space \(X = (\mathbb{R}^n, \|\cdot\|) \) is called \textit{strongly \(\alpha \)-Euclidean} if there is a constant \(t \) such that \(t|y| \leqslant \|y\| \leqslant \alpha t|y| \) for every \(y\in Y \), and it is called \textit{strongly \(\alpha \)-complemented} if \(\|P_Y\| \leqslant \alpha \), where \(P_Y \) is the orthogonal projection from \(X \) to \(Y\) and \(\|P_Y\| \) denotes the operator norm of \(P_Y\) with respect to the norm \( \|\cdot\|\). The authors present an example of \(X = (\mathbb{R}^n, \|\cdot\|) \) of arbitrarily high dimension that is strongly 2-Euclidean but contains no 2-dimensional subspace that is both strongly \((1 + \varepsilon) \)-Euclidean and strongly \((1 + \varepsilon) \)-complemented, where \(\varepsilon > 0\) is an absolute constant. To be more precise, using a probabilistic argument they demonstrate the existence, for every even \(n > 35\), of a self-adjoint idempotent operator (projector on a subspace) \(P: \mathbb{R}^n \to \mathbb{R}^n\) of \(\textrm{rank}\, P = n/2\) such that the norm \[ \|x\| = \langle x, x + Px \rangle^{\frac12} + 2^{-40} n^{-\frac12} \|x\|_1 \] has the desired property with \(\varepsilon = 2^{-1017}\). This property is closely related to the following old open question of Vitali Milman: Is it true that for every \(k \in \mathbb{N}\), \(C \in \mathbb{R}\), and \(\varepsilon > 0\) there exists \(n \in \mathbb{N}\) such that every \(C\)-Euclidean normed space \(X\) of dimension at least \(n\) has a \(k\)-dimensional subspace \(Y \subset X\) that is \((1 + \varepsilon)\)-Euclidean and \((1 + \varepsilon)\)-complemented?