At the source of what is now known as “geometric stability theory” was Zil'ber's intuition that the essential properties of an aleph-one-categorical theory were controlled by the geometries of its minimal types. (However, the situation is much more complex than was assumed in Zil'ber [1984], since the main conjecture of that paper has been disproved by Hrushovski.) This is not unnatural in this unidimensional case, where all these geometries have isomorphic contractions, but it was even realized later, in Cherlin, Harrington and Lachlan [1985] and Buechler [1986], that, for any superstable theory with finite ranks, a certain “local” property, i.e. a property satisfied by the geometry of each type of rank one (namely: to have a projective contraction), was equivalent to a “global” one (the theory is one-based, hence satisfies a coordinatization lemma). Then it was shown, in Pillay [1986], that this situation does not generalize to the infinite rank case, that, even for a theory of rank omega, the (local) assumption of projectivity for all the regular types of the theory does not have an exact global counterpart.To clarify this kind of phenomena, I suggest here the elimination of their geometrical aspect, considering only the case where all of the geometries are degenerate. I will study various notions of triviality, which make sense in a stable context, and turn out to be equivalent in the finite rank case; some of them have a definite global flavour, others are of local character.
On the rank of von Neumann special flows