On measures induced by forcing names for ultrafilters

Abstract

We study the interplay between properties of measures on a Boolean algebra A and forcing names for ultrafilters on A. We show that several well known measure theoretic properties of Boolean algebras (such as supporting a strictly positive measure or carrying only separable measures) have quite natural characterizations in the forcing language. We show some applications of this approach. In particular, we reprove a theorem of Kunen saying that in the classical random model there are no towers of height ω2.