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”.
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.