In the event of a vacuum phase transition, could the universe be left into a state with no fundamental symmetries?
I was having a discussion with a physicist asking him whether there could be any process, compatible with our current knowledge of physics, where the universe would be left without any fundamental symmetries (no <PERSON> symmetry, no gauge symmetries, no conservation laws symmetries...etc).
This is what he told me:
If a vacuum decay would occur, and a high energy density is released, we would have a state far away indeed from the newly reached vacuum, and if the sate is not near the vacuum below then such a vacuum would not be relevant for physicists living in such a situation. They would hardly know if there were a vacuum ''behind'' the situation they would live in. They would rather think of something like the actual hot situation as the only state they could consider in reality. But this hot state would have no symmetries because there would be particles around breaking any symmetry. 298
I think that what I am saying is that we only have the great amount of symmetries in our present theory becourse we are sufficiently close to a vacuum situation, with a huge amount of symmetries, but without such an almost realizable - but still just imagined - vacuum state with a lot of symmetry we would not ``see'' the many nice symmetries. So if one comes too far from a vacuum with high symmetry we can't conceive the symmetries.
However, this sounds to me as if, while in the state no symmetries would appear, there would be actually symmetries at the fundamental level (the vacuum). But perhaps I am making the wrong picture. So, even if there was so much heat produced that the state would be completely different from the vacuum where it would "rest upon", would that still mean that fundamentally there would be no symmetries?
And also, I've read some models and theories in physics that assume that, as we turn backwards the history of the universe and approach the Big Bang (and heat and energy density would continuously grow) we would find more and more symmetries. Even if that was true, could somehow the situation that this physicist described give as a result a state with no symmetries at all? 484