>>11269121Ah, ok, I think I know what you mean now and you're scepticism is valid to a great extent. You're right, we can refine our models up to infinity and beyond and will still be unsure about whether this is what nature really is, or just an approximate abstraction. This is true for every model and as humans, we're unfortunately bound to rely on interpretations. I don't think there'll ever be an experiment able to give us insight into the foundations and actual building blocks of the universe.
Hm, regarding electromagnetism, imagine a ball of iron. It has tiny elementary magnetic dipoles in it, that are completely chaotically aligned, when the temperature of the iron ball is held above the Curie temperature. This thing is completely spherically symmetric, right? It has zero magnetic field, is a perfect ball, temperature same everywhere.
Now imagine what happens if you cool it down veeery slowly. Some magnet will stop chaotically spinning around and align with their neighbors. If you're slow enough, in the end, they will all align perfectly and form a macroscopic dipole. Now the whole thing is only cylindrically symmetric. That's spontaneous symmetry breaking. The ground state (cool state) has less symmetry than the excited state, resulting in a force field.
What I'm trying to say with that is that while the building blocks are absolutely subject to debate, the mechanisms are less so. We don't know if this is exactly what is going on in nature, but it seems spontaneous symmetry breaking does occur with whatever particles habituate it.
