What is spontaneous symmetry breaking from a classical point of view. Could you give some examples, using classical systems.I am studying about the 't Hooft and Polyakov magnetic monopoles solutions, which says that the SU(2) symmetry is spontaneously broken down to U(1) symmetry. What does this mean exactly? Also, why do we consider a mexican hat potential in the yang-mills-higgs lagrangian, whose EOM give us the solutions to the monopoles, using the Euler-Lagrange equation. I tried reading about this from the internet, but most of the sources have reference to quantum systems ( I havent done QM and QFT), and I haven't been able to understand symmetry breaking from the few classical examples that I found.