We affirm a conjecture of Sacks [1972] by showing that every countable distributive lattice is isomorphic to an initial segment of the hyperdegrees, $\scr{D}_{h}$ . In fact, we prove that every sublattice of any hyperarithmetic lattice (and so, in particular, every countable, locally finite lattice) is isomorphic to an initial segment of $\scr{D}_{h}$ . Corollaries include the decidability of the two quantifier theory of $\scr{D}_{h}$ and the undecidability of its three quantifier theory. The key tool in the proof is a (...) new lattice representation theorem that provides a notion of forcing for which we can prove a version of the fusion lemma in the hyperarithmetic setting and so the preservation of $\omega _{1}^{CK}$ . Somewhat surprisingly, the set theoretic analog of this forcing does not preserve ω₁. On the other hand, we construct countable lattices that are not isomorphic to any initial segment of $\scr{D}_{h}$. (shrink)

We combine two techniques of set theory relating to minimal degrees of constructibility. Jensen constructed a minimal real which is additionally a Π 1 2 singleton. Groszek built an initial segment of order type 1 + α * , for any ordinal α. This paper shows how to force a Π 1 2 singleton such that the c-degrees beneath it, all represented by reals, are of type 1 + α * , for many ordinals α. We also examine the definability (...) α needs to be so represented by a real. (shrink)