Ergodic Banach Spaces

Abstract

We show that any Banach space contains a continuum of non isomorphic subspaces or a minimal subspace. We define an ergodic Banach space $X$ as a space such that $E_0$ Borel reduces to isomorphism on the set of subspaces of $X$, and show that every Banach space is either ergodic or contains a subspace with an unconditional basis $ which is complementably universal for the family of its block-subspaces. We also use our methods to get uniformity results; for example, in combination with a result of B. Maurey, V. Milman and N. Tomczak-Jaegermann, we show that an unconditional basis of a Banach space, of which every block-subspace is complemented, must be asymptotically $c_0$ or $l_p$.