A worldly cardinal permits a countable transitive model of ZFC and a transitive model of ZFC with , , and . First collapse a countable elementary substructure of . Then collapse an -sized Skolem hull containing every countable ordinal and every member of , as well as itself. The transitive collapse fixes transitive subsets lemma preserves and those ordinals.
We construct the two transitive models together, taking care that the later collapse really retains the earlier model. First, a worldly cardinal is greater than : ZFC in contains the full power set , and the axiom of choice there gives a bijection between it and an ordinal . That power set is externally uncountable by Cantor theorem, so . Infinity rules out the finite cardinals and before this argument is applied.
By the Downward Lowenheim-Skolem theorem, choose a countable elementary substructure . Its inherited membership is a well-founded relation, and elementarity transfers extensionality from . Apply the Mostowski collapse theorem to obtain a countable transitive model of ZFC. Because is a countable transitive set, it is a hereditarily countable set and its rank of a set is below . In particular, .
Now take the Skolem hull in of the seed
Call it . The seed has external cardinality and lies inside . The hull is an elementary substructure of with : closure under countably many finitary Skolem functions gives the upper bound, and gives the lower bound. Let be its Mostowski collapse theorem map. Then is a transitive model of ZFC.
The transitive collapse fixes transitive subsets lemma gives for every , since is transitive. Since also , the collapse sends that element to itself. Thus , and transitivity of yields the required inclusion:
This is the construction of nested transitive models from a worldly cardinal; the next two parts verify its size and ordinal requirements.
The collapse is a bijection, so . Every and every element of belong to . The transitive collapse fixes transitive subsets lemma therefore gives , so every ambient countable ordinal belongs to .
Moreover, correctly regards each such as countable. An injection has rank below , so a witness belongs to . Elementarity gives “ is a countable ordinal”. Transporting this statement across the collapse, which fixes , gives the same statement in .
The collapse also fixes the element . No injection exists externally, hence none belongs to ; together with the countability witnesses below it, this shows that correctly identifies as its first uncountable ordinal. Elementarity and the collapse preserve that identification. Thus the construction gives