Re:Bohr–van Leeuwen theorem – magnetism in solids is a quant...
by acqq on Sunday July 19, 2020 @05:58PM
(#23892785)
I understood that differently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22816968
Hint, the questions were:
"Now, what is it, the feeling between those two magnets?"
"There's something there, isn't there?"
"what's going on between these two bits of metal"
"What does that mean, or why are they doing that, or how are they doing that?"
I don't know what phenomena you study, but I assure you that "magnets" aren't the only topic for which the "feeling" and "what does that mean" and "why" questions would warrant the same answer.
And where answering "how" would be cheating if the answer would use some false analogy.
Having said that, there is a lot to think about in his irritation. For example: the mysteries of magnets are no more mysterious than lots of other things that we take for granted and treat as entirely unmysterious. To priviledge magnets with an almost magical respect when we haven't spotted that gravity is at least as mysterious is a failure of imagination.
There's also the question 'what kind of answer would you accept'? When we can only express bafflement about a phenomenon, we're still in the prescientific myths and magic world. You can't really get to the scientific world until you can formulate some kind of question. The passage from Hitchikers about the Ultimate Question touches on something pretty profound.
Still, I think an honest expression of bafflement is an excellent beginning (or at least it's where I often find myself), and I think there may have been more sympathetic ways Feynmann could have expressed his thoughts on the topic.