The Lévy-Solovay Theorem [8] limits the kind of large cardinal embeddings that can exist in a small forcing extension. Here I announce a generalization of this theorem to a broad new class of forcing notions. One consequence is that many of the forcing iterations most commonly found in the large cardinal literature create no new weakly compact cardinals, measurable cardinals, strong cardinals, Woodin cardinals, strongly compact cardinals, supercompact cardinals, almost huge cardinals, huge cardinals, and so on.

The Gap Forcing Theorem, a key contribution of this paper, implies essentially that after any reverse Easton iteration of closed forcing, such as the Laver preparation, every supercompactness measure on a supercompact cardinal extends a measure from the ground model. Thus, such forcing can create no new supercompact cardinals, and, if the GCH holds, neither can it increase the degree of supercompactness of any cardinal; in particular, it can create no new measurable cardinals. In a crescendo of what I call (...) exact preservation theorems, I use this new technology to perform a kind of partial Laver preparation, and thereby finely control the class of posets which preserve a supercompact cardinal. Eventually, I prove the ‘As You Like It’ Theorem, which asserts that the class of κ -directed closed posets which preserve a supercompact cardinal κ can be made by forcing to conform with any pre-selected local definition which respects the equivalence of forcing. Along the way I separate completely the levels of the superdestructibility hierarchy, and, in an epilogue, prove that the notions of fragility and superdestructibility are orthogonal — all four combinations are possible. (shrink)

A model in which strongness ofκ is indestructible under κ+ -weakly closed forcing notions satisfying the Prikry condition is constructed. This is applied to solve a question of Hajnal on the number of elements of {λ δ |2 δ <λ}.

We summarize the known methods of producing a non-supercompact strongly compact cardinal and describe some new variants. Our Main Theorem shows how to apply these methods to many cardinals simultaneously and exactly control which cardinals are supercompact and which are only strongly compact in a forcing extension. Depending upon the method, the surviving non-supercompact strongly compact cardinals can be strong cardinals, have trivial Mitchell rank or even contain a club disjoint from the set of measurable cardinals. These results improve and (...) unify Theorems 1 and 2 of [5], due to the first author. (shrink)

We prove three theorems concerning Laver indestructibility, strong compactness, and measurability. We then state some related open questions.

We prove three theorems which show that it is relatively consistent for any strong cardinal κ to be fully Laver indestructible under κ-directed closed forcing.