Hilbert spaces and \(C^\ast\)-algebras are not finitely concrete (Q2104873)

The main result of this article is that there does not exist a faithful functor that preserves directed colimits from the category of Hilbert spaces with injective linear contractions as morphisms to the category of sets. In other words the category \(\mathbf{Hilb}_m\) of Hilbert spaces with injective linear contractions is not what the authors call finitely concrete. In contrast they observe that categories coming from abstract elementary classes, in the sense of Shelah, with models as objects and embeddings (injective homomorphisms that reflect all relations in a signature) as morphisms, are finitely concrete. The same applies to categories of models for some fragment of \(\mathbb{L}_{\kappa, \omega},\) for an infinite cardinal \(\kappa,\) or for the category of models for a first-order theory with structure homomorphisms as morphisms. Hence the category of Hilbert spaces with injective linear contractions can not be equivalent to an abstract elementary class, or axiomatizable in either first-order logic or \(\mathbb{L}_{\kappa, \omega},\) the logic permitting conjunctions or disjunctions of less than \(\kappa \) formulas. The proof of the main result uses cardinality arguments that build around a notion of support in a subspace, for an element of a Hilbert space, that they introduce. By comparing a number of categories to \(\mathbf{Hilb}_m\) they show that they are not finitely concrete. These include complete metric spaces with injective contractions, Banach spaces with injective linear contractions, the category of Hilbert spaces with linear contractions and the category of commutative unital \(C^* \)-algebras with unit-preserving \(*\)-homomorphisms.