The impossibility of finding relative complements for recursively enumerable degrees

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Abstract
J. R. Shoenfield conjectured in a talk at the Berkeley Model Theory Symposium (1963) that, if b and d are non-zero recursively enumerable (r.e.) degrees such that b < d then there exists an r.e. degree c such that c < d and b U c = d. G. E. Sacks echoed this conjecture at the end of [3]. In this paper the conjecture is disproved. We construct r.e. degrees b, d such that 0 < b < d and such that for no r.e. degree c is it true that c < d and b U c = d. We are grateful to G. E. Sacks for suggesting this problem.