I recall a Richard Feynman video where the interviewer asks him to explain how magnets work.
His answer amounts to “I can’t explain that to you because if I gave you an accurate answer it would be too technical for it to make sense to you, and if I simplified it to the extent that you could understand, it would no longer be a meaningful answer.”
I guess they are, there’s for sure something to that, but at the same time these quantum or relativistic phenomena really can’t be described accurately in simple words
It’s certainly unintuitive, but that makes sense; our intuition is formed from our experiences, and we have no experience with the domains that relativity and Quantum mechanics apply to.
I expect Feynman’s answer, if he had a whiteboard and unlimited time, would’ve been to dive into Maxwell’s equations.
With that in mind, his answer makes complete sense. Good luck explaining coupled PDEs to people who aren’t mathy in a few sentences without visual aid. The analogy to the gravitational force isn’t on point; there’s a lot more to be said about how magnets tie to into E&M more broadly, compared to gravity.
Though you’re absolutely right that once you get deep enough into any topic in physics that the answer to “why?” inevitably becomes “it just be like that”.
I recall a Richard Feynman video where the interviewer asks him to explain how magnets work.
His answer amounts to “I can’t explain that to you because if I gave you an accurate answer it would be too technical for it to make sense to you, and if I simplified it to the extent that you could understand, it would no longer be a meaningful answer.”
All of the most-impactful minds in science were mocked by their contemporaries.
Think about it.
That interview answer always seemed like a cop-out to me. You could make a comparison to gravity to explain how magnetism “just is”.
A lot of Feynman quotes are ultimately just witty cop-outs IMO.
I guess they are, there’s for sure something to that, but at the same time these quantum or relativistic phenomena really can’t be described accurately in simple words
It’s certainly unintuitive, but that makes sense; our intuition is formed from our experiences, and we have no experience with the domains that relativity and Quantum mechanics apply to.
I expect Feynman’s answer, if he had a whiteboard and unlimited time, would’ve been to dive into Maxwell’s equations.
With that in mind, his answer makes complete sense. Good luck explaining coupled PDEs to people who aren’t mathy in a few sentences without visual aid. The analogy to the gravitational force isn’t on point; there’s a lot more to be said about how magnets tie to into E&M more broadly, compared to gravity.
Though you’re absolutely right that once you get deep enough into any topic in physics that the answer to “why?” inevitably becomes “it just be like that”.
Here’s the video.
It’s been a while since I watched it, so judge for yourself.