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This is the hardest concept to understand in physics
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this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2025
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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.
His point was that we don't understand the interaction between fundamental forces enough to say, if we were to try and answer the question accurately enough.
So, in one sense ICP was right that we don't know how magnets work. But also they were wrong that scientists be lying. They shouldn't have been pissed.
That interview answer always seemed like a cop-out to me. You could make a comparison to gravity to explain how magnetism "just is".
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”.
Yeah, a proper answer would need to dive into how it relates to electricity for sure
https://xkcd.com/1489
Title-Text: "Of these four forces, there's one we don't really understand." "Is it the weak force or the strong--" "It's gravity."
Here's the video.
It's been a while since I watched it, so judge for yourself.
I think OP's meme illustrates Feynman's point very well; there comes a stage where if the number of incorrect statements in your explanation outnumber the the correct ones, it's no longer a meaningful explanation.
To me, there's two ways you could interpret that, one is what are the effects of magnetism which we learn on high school physics, the other other is why does magnetism have those effects which is more something you'd learn in an undergraduate physics or chemistry degree.
The answer to why they have those effects would grant you a Nobel prize.
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.
Uuuh I have to remember that one