# The Practical Impact of Set-Theoretic Axioms on Measure Theory

The set-theoretic evidence is that we could probably safely add axioms to make many more sets measurable. For example, we could add axioms that would make projective sets measurable.

I'm curious what would be the implications for working analysts of such a move. I can see two potential ways in which it could potentially have an impact:

• Currently, proving measurability of sets is a somewhat fussy activity. With the additional freedom provided by extra constructions, the existing theory would become much simpler.
• There are existing theories that are already straining at the limits of what can proved measurable in ZFC. These theories could be usefully extended.

I could also see that it potentially having no real impact. I'd be curious to hear which if any of these possibilities actually holds.

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A standard application of Martin's axiom en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin%27s_axiom is the existence of Banach limits satisfying some measurability conditions (medial means in the sense of Mokobodzki). See my answer to math.stackexchange.com/q/54554 for some details and references and part 4 of that answer for a basic sample application that might illustrate their power. –  Theo Buehler Jan 1 '13 at 23:12

I don't wish to turn my ignorance into undue vehemence, but apropos of Todd's remark, I have always felt that the category of Banach spaces becomes much nastier if the dual of $L^\infty$ is $L^1$. Closed subspaces of reflexive spaces are no longer guaranteed to be reflexive; something odd must be happening with Hahn-Banach (meaning that duals of certain classes of short exact sequences are now no longer short exact), one loses automatic recourse to the "embed into the double dual to take advantage of compactness in the weak-star topology" technique, and so on. –  Yemon Choi Jan 1 '13 at 4:11