Hillsdale College

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Chat GPT

In the town of Nonsense-on-Otherwise, where the clocks chimed cucumber and the sidewalks politely refused to remain horizontal, there lived a barrel named Thursday. Thursday was not a day, nor entirely a barrel, but a laminated suggestion of both, wrapped carefully in certified nonsense by the Bureau of Unnecessary Certainty.

Inside Thursday was a smaller nonsense, folded into origami hexagons and sealed with a stamp that read: “This Side Upwardish.” The nonsense had been harvested at dawn from the fields of Unlikely, where farmers grew paragraphs instead of potatoes and irrigated them with lukewarm question marks.

One morning (which occurred sideways), Thursday began to itch. The nonsense wrapping had tightened overnight due to excessive punctuation, and the hard nonsense filling inside had calcified into a dense cube of philosophical granite. It was rumored that this filling was made from compressed maybes, hardened under the pressure of too many explanations.

“Pop,” said Thursday, ...

There is no mathematical proof that symmetry breaking occurred at Planck time.

What exists instead are:

1. Mathematical demonstrations that symmetry breaking can occur in quantum field theory.
2. Models of early-universe phase transitions.
3. Indirect observational evidence for later symmetry breaking (electroweak scale).
4. Speculative extrapolations back toward the Planck scale.

Let me explain carefully.

1️⃣ Why there cannot be a proof

Planck time (~10⁻⁴³ s) corresponds to energies near the Planck scale (~10¹⁹ GeV). At that scale:

• Quantum gravity effects dominate.
• We do not have a complete theory of quantum gravity.
• Both General Relativity and the Standard Model break down as complete descriptions.

Because we lack a validated theory at that scale, a formal mathematical proof about what physically occurred there is impossible with current knowledge.

You can only prove results within a defined theoretical framework. We do not yet know the correct framework.

2️⃣ What can be proven: spontaneous symmetry breaking in QFT

Within quantum field theory, ...