The discussion centers on the unification of forces in the early universe, particularly during the Planck time, and explores the reasons behind this unification, the implications of high temperatures and pressures, and the potential for laboratory replication. It also touches on the current understanding of force unification, including electromagnetic forces, and the speculative nature of including gravity in these models.
Participants express differing views on the reasons for force unification and the implications of high-energy processes. There is no consensus on whether forces can be replicated in laboratories or the role of gravity in unification theories.
Participants acknowledge that many assumptions underlie current models of force unification, and the discussion reflects a variety of perspectives on these assumptions and the speculative nature of certain claims.
No. We reason that, by current understanding, they must have been (for some ideas about physics to hold) ... due to the scale of the Universe at the time. You maybe want to treat it as an assumption to be tested.GhostLoveScore said:I have been reading [where?] that until the universe was one Planck time old (10-43 seconds) all the forces were unified into one. Do we know why would they be unified?
Nobody knows.Could we replicate it in the labs one day?
The unification, in this case, was a mathematical unification ... a realization that what we had been calling two separate forces were, in fact, due to an underlying process looked at from different perspectives. This is to say: it's a correction of an historical misunderstanding: a mistake ... it is not clear how any existing force could separate into some collection of other forces as yet unknown but there is no reason to suspect that electromagnetism, should it split into other forces, would split into electricity and magnetism.Today Electric and Magnetic force are unified into Electromagnetic force. Could they separate one day?
Well, one hint is given by the standard model. Interaction strengths depend on the energy scale of the process. One can show that for a certain energy scale, all three interaction strengths become almost equal. Because the corresponding energy scale is very high, and we suspect that the standard model needs extension for such high energy scales, many physicists suspect that this 'almost' is not a coincidence and becomes an 'exactly' once the standard model has been extended in the right way.GhostLoveScore said:I have been reading that until the universe was one Planck time old (10-43 seconds) all the forces were unified into one. Do we know why would they be unified? Is it very large temperatures and pressures? Could we replicate it in the labs one day? Today Electric and Magnetic force are unified into Electromagnetic force. Could they separate one day?
haushofer said:Well, one hint is given by the standard model. Interaction strengths depend on the energy scale of the process. One can show that for a certain energy scale, all three interaction strengths become almost equal.