system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What does it even mean for the fundamental forces to be “unified” just after the Big Bang?

This concept simply doesn’t make sense to me. The idea that they could be unified. How does that even make sense, and how would it manifest in the world at the time?
gpt
What scientists have been able to prove is that once you add a certain amount of energy to a system, certain forces start behaving the same way. Going up in energy you first have Electromagnetism and the Weakforce merging into the Electroweak force, then the Electroweak force and Strong force merge and finally, that new frankenforce will merge with gravity once we hit a certain energy level.

Problem is, the last time the universe was at that energy level was right after the big bang. Scientists really want to know what happened there because if they're able to describe how the forces split off one another, it should be considerably easier to come up with one unified model for how forces work. This is particularly important because at the moment we have to irreconcilable branches of physics to govern small and large systems (quantum mech. And gravity) but figuring this out might merge the two together.