How could all four fundamental forces be one single force at the beginning of the universe? Did this single force then behave like all four at the same time? How do we know that?
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Disclaimer: I’m not a physicist, just an enthusiasts. Feel free to correct me in anything badly wrong o say.
First of all, it’s a not a proven fact of nature, scientists are still working to understand if this is actually the case. Except the electromagnetic and weak force that we know are part of the same electroweak force.
The idea behind this is that scientist think there were never 4 forces but only one and what we see now are 4 special cases of them that manifest in 4 different situations. At the big bang the energies of all particles, the “heath”, was so high that there was no space for these differences to be noticeable but when the universe expanded and cooled down, then they did.
A good illustrative examples (but not what actually happened at the big bang) of this is the dipole alignment in magnetic metals. Think of a metal with all atoms like little magnets with little North and South poles each. Each atom also has a thermal vibration and jiggles around a little but overall all atoms are aligned along their magnetic axis and point in the same direction. In this scenario the force of magnetism is visible and can manifest itself through and atoms interacting.
Now, if you add heath the atoms will start to vibrate more and more up to a point where this vibration is so strong that it overcomes the magnetic force and each atom starts to point in a random direction. Voilà! Magnetism has become minor and while still present its effects are not visible on the interaction between atoms. This badly explained example is taken from https://youtu.be/qKVpknSKgE0 around minute 9
Going back to the electroweak force I mentioned above, its unification happens at temperatures around 10^15 K, way above any temperature currently in the universe and that’s why we see them acting as two separate forces. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction
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