The Cohomology of the Ordinals I: Basic Theory and Consistency Results

In this paper, the first in a projected two-part series, we describe an organizing framework for the study of infinitary combinatorics. This framework is \v{C}ech cohomology. We show in particular that the \v{C}ech cohomology groups of the ordinals articulate higher-dimensional generalizations of Todorcevic's walks and coherent sequences techniques, and begin to account for those techniques' `unreasonable effectiveness' on $\omega_1$. This discussion occupies the first half of our paper and is written with a general mathematical audience in mind. We turn in the paper's second half to more properly set-theoretic considerations. We describe a number of consistency results on the cohomology groups of the ordinals which certify their status as a graded family of incompactness principles. We show in particular that nontrivial cohomology groups on the ordinals are in some tension with large cardinals, and are maximally extant in G\"{o}del's model $\mathrm{L}$. We describe forcings to add, then trivialize, nontrivial $n$-cocycles, and conclude with some comparison of these principles with those benchmark incompactness phenomena, the existence of square sequences and failures of stationary reflection.