Charles Liu

Currently, we think that the universe has four forces in it.

that sort of determine all of the transfer of energy and material and so forth around the universe.

There's something called the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, and gravity.

Now, gravity is its own strange beast because there is a hypothesis that gravity as a force actually has more to do with the structure of space-time than the transfer of little particles back and forth.

But electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force are now separate forces.

They have different mathematical explanations and they behave differently depending on where they are and what size and scales and so forth are around.

It makes sense to hypothesize that right around the time of the Big Bang, there were not four forces, but there was only one.

And something happened at the quantum level to break forces off from one another.

And that break is called a spontaneous symmetry break.

So when I was saying spontaneous symmetry breaking, you can imagine something breaking and from the inside of that break that used to be symmetric, this one beautiful force that followed all of its math, now is two or now is three.

Or now it's four.

And the resulting chaos, it's almost like unleashing to some extent that entropy we were talking about when we're trying to boil water.

But now we're unleashing just straight up energy in such huge densities and such huge amounts that it will propel the universe to grow at such a rate and such a speed that we pass the black hole thresholds.

And then you have to start all over again and turn that energy into matter and then make black holes again.

thousands or even millions of years later.

Oh, that's a great philosophical point of view.

I would answer all of physics, all of astronomy is trying to tell a story, right?

The hypotheses of every explanation as to why something happens in our universe is a story.

The difference between a story that is non-scientific and a story that is scientific is

is that the scientific story seeks to find ways to confirm or refute that story.