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Comment by chm | Hacker News Reader

To me Feynman was acting like a jerk at that moment. He was aware of who was interviewing him and should have acted accordingly. He knew what the purpose of the interview was, and who the audience would be. He could have simply stated that the question can be answered with varying degrees of sophistication, but an ultimate "why" is not to be found.

The journalist was in no way pretending to have any physics knowledge nor was he insinuating anything. He asked a totally reasonable question and wanted Feynman to talk about magnets, not rant about how there's no ultimate answer to a "why" question.

Feynman was being arrogant and patronizing when he shouldn't have been. Just search for "why" on this[1] page and see if he himselfs asks "why" questions.

[1]:http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_01.html

EDIT: Alright, this turned into a tiring argument about who's right or wrong, when in this context it's a non-issue. People react differently to his sermon, end of the question. Is Feynman right about "why" questions? I think so. Was it necessary to make the point as he did when he did? I don't think so.

And please stop making assumptions about me. I'm all for discussion, but you need not assume anything, just as I reciprocate. You have no idea who I am, and nor I you, but we can still talk!

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Well, I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. He always had a very brash, blunt delivery, and here its as evident as ever. But his underlying point is a good one.

The trouble is that the interviewer asked an unwittingly complex question. The tricky thing about gravity or magnetism or light or what have you is that our daily experiences with them seem so simple, and yet underneath they're deeply complicated and unintuitive.

The result is that physicists try to explain things with metaphors that don't actually work, in the hopes of making the unintuitive intuitive. The result is a kind of pseudoscience that causes lay people to come to poor conclusions.

For example, to explain global climate change you might use a metaphor of a greenhouse. Except that tricks people into thinking that the globe just warms uniformly. Then any cold winter is used as evidence to disprove the theory when all they're doing is disproving a bad metaphor.

So here Dr. Feynman uses this simple question to illustrate how complex some things can actually be.

While also coming across as a bit pompous, unfortunately.

As an aside this video is part of an amazing series. They're all worth a watch, IMO.

> He always had a very brash, blunt delivery, and here its as evident as ever.

Is half a minute of Socratic method leading into a comprehensive lecture answer really rude enough to call "very brash"?

Brash doesn't necessarily equate to rude, or at least it doesn't to me, though I admit I may be using it incorrectly.

I've watched a lot of Dr. Feynman's talks. His style is very... I don't know how else to describe it except brash. Aggressive is too strong a word. Forceful? Doesn't feel quite right. Compare him to Sagan or Green or Kaku or any number of others and Feynman always felt like he had these rough edges that never got filed off. IMO its part of what makes him relatable, that lack of polish.

Frankly, when working around many excitable, brilliant, bullish people, one often finds that one must start a conversation loudly in order to clear the floor, or else one runs the very real risk of getting interrupted and having a bunch of time wasted. [0]

If you look carefully, you'll see that this is what Feynman does in this little clip.

[0] I understand that there are people who find this style of conversation off-putting. Thing is, just as there is a protocol for taking the floor, there is also a protocol for retaking the floor if your colleague is seriously going off the rails.

Brash equates to irreverent though, and given Feynman is a brilliant teacher first and foremost, you'd do well to shut up, sit down and learn something from him. <--That's irreverent. :) Honestly though, I don't see him being dismissive or scornful. In fact, I see him rise to the occasion to teach something well beyond what was asked of him. You can't beat that.

IMO Green's, Kaku's and by far most todays' popular physicist interviews aren't even in the same league as Feynman's. They all seem to hide behind platitudes that don't facilitate any deeper understanding, while Feynman tries to be truthful to science, i.e. he tries to not do any false statements just for the sake of simplifying the matter. He describes using simple words rather than to break it down.

Looking at that video again, I don't understand why you'd think he was a jerk there (Feynman could be called a jerk for other things he did in his life, but IMO never for the way he tried to explain physics to non physicists). His answer was as clear and concise as he could make it, and he even faults himself for the lack of deeper explanation: Magnetism is (in a slightly simplified manner) one of the fundamental forces, so he does not understand it as something that can be explained further, using any analogy understood by laymen. He also explains why analogies don't hold up here and how magnetism is more fundamental than collisions between macroscopical objects (the hand on the table). He also says that it's an 'excellent' question (from the point of view of a curious mind), after which he explains the flaw inherent to the question.

Asking the right questions is an important concept in science, and I also often have difficulties with people who find it rude when a question itself is analyzed, sometimes turned back, before actually being answered. People who always want simple answers to seemingly simple questions IMO tend to have a fundamantal misunderstanding of reality as we know it from a scientific viewpoint.

Then why didn't Feynman simply say so? He patronized the interviewer and in my opinion it wasn't productive. An honest answer, and admittance that he didn't know of any better way to explain/justify it, would have been excellent. Instead we get sermoned.

And concerning your last paragraph, I assume you're talking about the interviewer and not me. I'm positive he wasn't looking for a "simple answer". He was just trying to get Feynman talking about magnetism.

> Then why didn't Feynman simply say so?

When introducing complex or rather unfamiliar concepts -particularly ones that run contrary to their understanding of things-, people tend to remember stories and analogies better than simple, short, declarative sentences.

Many non-technical people either never knew or had forgotten that the real answer to even the most straightforward "why" question can be mind-crushingly complex.

I just remember taking thermodynamics for the first time. It was very hard to wrap me small brain around it. I also remember reading Feynman's short intro to quantum mechanics to dummies, and again it was hard to wrap my brain around it. Brass tax some subjects the human brain doesn't grasp very easily based on common education, experience and perception. Understanding some subjects requires a lot of odd rewiring of the old monkey brain.

So yeah, Feynman's explanation seems legit, there is no lay explanation for magnets. He'd have to teach you quantum mechanics, at least enough to explain what's happening when you hold two magnets together. And it's not like he's unwilling, since teaching that it part of the way he made a living, it's just he can't do that in less than six months.

And then, you wouldn't be a lay person.

> And concerning your last paragraph, I assume you're talking about the interviewer and not me.

No, I was talking about you. The interviewer seemed to slightly misunderstand Feynman's hesitation in the beginning, but then he was willing to listen and apparently saw the value in Feynman's response (otherwise this wouldn't have aired the way it did). You on the other hand are the one taking offense.

Then you are quite mistaken in your assumptions about me and should consider revising the basis on which you made them.

You have hidden information that was only revealed much later in this conversation. One cannot be expected to divine this information.

This thread would have turned out better if you had stated something to the effect of "I have watched this BBC programme many, many times and I have always felt that Feynman's minute of Socratic lead-up to his answer to the interviewer's question about magnetism is inappropriate and rude." in your original post.

I doubt that many folks will read the comment you made to me in which you reveal that your opinions have been informed by multiple viewings of the source material in its entirety.

> He could have simply stated that the question can be answered with varying degrees of sophistication, but an ultimate "why" is not to be found.

That seems to me like a pretty vacuous answer. An "ultimate why" is almost never possible, saying that he couldn't answer the question would have been inaccurate, and just saying that he could only answer the question in a way that the audience couldn't understand would have been a hell of a lot more patronizing.

I think you may have missed Feynman's point about "why" questions. He wasn't merely pointing out that you can keep on asking "why", and he wasn't saying that there was something wrong with asking "why". He was pointing out that where you let it stop depends on the context. In the context of everyday non-physicist understanding, you really can't correctly answer "why do magnets repel?" with anything much deeper than "they just do", but if you're willing to bring in significantly more advanced concepts you can go several layers deeper and explain the math behind interaction of magnetic fields and how ferromagnetism arises and so on. But there's a pretty big gap between the layman explanation and the next most detailed explanation that isn't highly misleading.

    He was pointing out that where you let it stop depends on the context.

And there you have said it. I haven't missed the point. Feynman did by not acting on the context of the interviewer's question. Of course he had to stop somewhere in his explanations. But he definitely could have talked about magnetic fields, and electrons, and spin, etc. instead of giving a sermon.

Really, by that logic, he could simply have stopped the interview and sent the journalist to college for a physics degree.

If you go to the linked YouTube video, you will see that this one conversation is one of a series of conversations in a larger production. wtallis pointed out elsewhere in this thread that this was a BBC production for a largely non-technical audience.

You have missed the point because you were unaware of the larger context in which that one conversation sat. :)

    You have missed the point because you were unaware of
    the larger context in which that one conversation sat. :)

Why are you so sure? Most commenters who don't agree with me have wrong preconceptions/assumptions about me. I have watched this whole series of videos multiple times over the years. I have always felt that Feynman's sermon was not useful.

You're not just claiming that his answer wasn't useful, you're claiming that it could have been even within the context and constraints of that interview. Feynman, who had far better knowledge than we of both the subject matter and the purposes of the interview, did not think that it was possible.

wtallis's reply is better than mine, but you asked me a question, so I owe you a response:

> Why are you so sure?

For several reasons. The best one is as follows:

Any video about science for a non-technical audience featuring a well-respected scientist and lecturer is incomplete without a section that explains that "Why" questions are often the most difficult to answer because of the inherent complexity of even the simplest seeming things.

> largely non-technical audience

A largely non-technical audience who wished to have an expert explain these matters to them.

Yeah. Which makes the objections even more mystifying.

> But he definitely could have talked about magnetic fields, and electrons, and spin, etc. instead of giving a sermon.

Name-dropping magnetic fields and electrons and spin isn't an explanation. Neither is telling someone that Bohr had proved 70 years earlier that classical mechanics was insufficient to explain the phenomenon. An explanation that imparted some understanding beyond mere word association, some ability to predict consequences or recognize other manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon, would have been many times longer than that video.

But then by your definition, name-dropping is what Feynman does during the entire series of videos. How does the train stay on the tracks?

Any question asked by the interviewer could have been answered in a lot more time than Feynman took. It just always felt odd to me that he stuck with this particular one. And notice that in the rest of the series we don't always hear what the question was.

> How does the train stay on the tracks?

Since you picked that example: which necessary concepts do you think he mentioned, left unexplained, and aren't familiar from everyday life?

I was satisfied with his answer. But along his own logic, answering "why does the train stay on the tracks" is a very much more involved question than at first appears, because our intuition and what we now know about gravity are not always in sync.

I still don't understand how you consider talking about "magnetic fields, spin and electrons" is name dropping in the case of magnetism, but is perfectly acceptable in the rest of the series :/

> I still don't understand how you consider talking about "magnetic fields, spin and electrons" is name dropping in the case of magnetism, but is perfectly acceptable in the rest of the series

The distinction is in whether you are pretending to explain those concepts, or merely referring to them as the causes. When answering some other question, you can mention those concepts and then go on to explain the consequences they have. In this case, after mentioning those concepts there's nothing more to say unless you're going to explain those concepts. There are no layers of understanding to be built up from unexplained assumptions about those concepts, because the original question is the very next layer up. And the next layer down is university-level.

He didn't balk at giving an explanation about trains, because there was useful progress to be made there. That wasn't the case for magnets. The fact that you can keep digging into either subject given sufficient study is irrelevant.

> Was it necessary to make the point as he did when he did? I don't think so.

Feynman was deliberate in his means of communication. Was it necessary? That's a tough one to answer.

As crazy as it sounds, causing your listener to be frustrated can be a very effective rhetorical device. Feynman's goal was to get the asker to think carefully about the question he had asked. Consider that, in a way, he was relaying his own sense of frustration to the asker.

Sometimes, in order to have someone truly understand you, it is necessary for them to shift their emotional state to one more similar to yours. The beauty of Feynman's explanation is that he hits the listener hard, then walks them back to a place of understanding. I thought it was a brilliant bit of teaching.

Was it necessary? I think that a short period of discomfort is a small exchange for a deeper understanding of not just how the physics of magnets work, but an understanding of how to properly ask questions, and just how deep the physics rabbit hole goes.

I don't agree. He really took the opportunity to teach an important lesson very effectively.

It just goes to show, even if one makes some really cool stuff, someone on the internet will find offense in it.

I'm not offended, but I would have been irritated if I was the interviewer.

Don't you think the mature man Feynman was talking to already knew what he was talking about with his "why" sermon? Do illiterates really go around and interview Richard Feynman? It was just out of place, really.

Are you saying that you think the BBC guy and his audience did know and understand enough about quantum mechanics to receive an explanation of magnetism?

No. I'm of the opinion that Feynman didn't teach him a lesson with his speech and analogies. You don't get hired by the BBC to interview Richard Feynman by being a dimwit yourself.

> ...Feynman didn't teach him a lesson...

While Feynman was speaking to the interviewer, the person to whom Feynman's words were truly directed was the person at home watching the interview, rather than the interviewer.

This is a critically important point that you appear to have missed. :)

I don't really understand all of the comments that are trying to argue with you. I personally agree, he WAS acting like a jerk at that moment. If it was anyone else, people would be very annoyed at the person arguing semantics when the meaning of the question was quite clear. But for some reason, since it's Feynman, people are acting as if he's somehow above reproach. As the interviewer stated, "It's a perfectly reasonable question."

But beyond the semantic argument he is making, I think the even greater issue is the lack of humility he is showing. In the writeup on the site they explain, "Feynman admits that it's actually an excellent question, but one he simply cannot answer in terms that a layperson can understand." But of course, that isn't true. The truth is that he doesn't have an answer, but he's choosing not to admit it.

In the end he says, "I really can't do a good job... any job... of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else that you're more familiar with because I don't understand it in terms of anything else that you're more familiar with." That's the closest he comes to actually making a humble statement, yet it's phrased in such a way that it seems like he's blaming the interviewer for not being capable of understanding.

When he said that he couldn't explain magnetic repulsion in terms of anything more familiar, he could have more correctly said that it cannot be explained in terms of something more familiar. The explanation requires quantum mechanics, which is definitely not familiar or intuitive to a layman audience. So when you complain about whether he's being humble or blaming the interviewer, you're putting emotional content into what's a purely objective factual statement.

But that's not entirely true. The fact is we DON'T actually know. There are working theories, but none of them truly explain things, which is another way of saying "we don't know." Instead of saying that, however, his explanation implies that HE knows, but everyone else is essentially too dumb to understand.

So no, it wasn't an entirely factual statement. A factual statement would have admitted that no one, including the leading theorists, actually understands the physical reason for magnetic attraction and repulsion.

Actually, Feynman never put the assumption that he knows on the table. Listen very closely.

He also is careful not to make a conclusive statement on the knowability of it all either.

Did you read my comment? Because, I explained this already.

'I can't really explain this through text though, so I'll give you a better explanation when I see you this evening.'

While I'm not explicitly saying I know you in real life in the previous sentence, one could certainly make that inference. And then when someone calls me a liar, all I have to say is, "Listen very carefully, I never said I knew ddingus."

The very nature of an implication is that you aren't explicitly saying something, but rather are phrasing it in a way so that another person would be led into thinking something else. That's what Feynman did.

That's still not an implication that one knows, just one that implies a better explanation, or put another way, sharing of a greater understanding.

Did the interviewer pick up on that subtlety? Who knows?

We could easily know we both will be somewhere, not yet knowing one another. Getting at your intent would require more context.

For sure, Feynman implied there is more he can share on the topic. An uninformed person may well characterize that as knowing. Feynman would definitely state that as understanding, as that is what science brings us. Actually knowing stuff is another thing entirely. He spent a lot of his life communicating that to people. Great support for the better intent possible in this exchange.

Should a detail dialog of that type actually happen, those things would be made clear, or be intrinsic to it.

People, who may not understand what science is, could come to the conclusion Feynman knows. But, I very strongly doubt that was his intent. This whole discussion is about an artifact of the limited time and language being used in the interview.

Surely we can't hold Feynman accountable or assign this intent. There isn't enough said to make that conclusion.

Sure, we don't have grand unified theories for everything. But that doesn't invalidate the fact that classical physics predicts the impossibility of permanent magnets. We've got a lower bound on the complexity of any explanation, and the bar's high enough to exclude anything relying only on the familiar intuitive concepts that are accessible to laypeople. Even if somebody does come up with a really easy to understand foundational theory, it would be new and unfamiliar and building up to macroscopic behavior of permanent magnets would be too big of an undertaking for this context given the requisite detour through QM.

I always had the same impression of that response. The basic philosophical point he's making instead of explaining magnetism to a lay-audience is known as the Munchhausen trilemma[1], essentially answering a completely different and unrelated question he'd prefer to pontificate on instead. He could certainly have given the interviewer an answer to the question that was actually asked, and have still used it to make the point about the infinite regress of "why."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnchhausen_Trilemma

Please understand that I mean no offence.

> He could certainly have given the interviewer an answer to the question that was actually asked, and have still used it to make the point about the infinite regress of "why."

Did you watch the clip in its entirety? If you did, you'd know that there's a few minute Socratic lead-up on the nature of the difficulty of answering "why" questions, followed by an audience-appropriate answer to the interviewer's question about magnetism. The answer includes what could be read as an apology for being unable to completely answer the interviewer's question.

If you haven't watched the clip in its entirety, you really owe it to yourself to go watch it. It won't take long, the whole thing is less than ten minutes. :)

Meh, I'm not sure it's worth continuing the debate over, honestly. But yes, I've watched the clip before, and have now watched it again. While he does give an answer at around 5:30, it's a pretty small part of the response. Imo, there are many possible ways to explain why a magnetic force is felt to a lay-audience, even touching on more advanced aspects like magnetism as a relativistic by-product of moving charges or dipole moments created by orbiting electrons. It's not like he didn't also write entire books for lay-audiences, the same as so many other physicists from Einstein to Tegmark have. I'd really rather not get into a huge conflict about the tactfulness of his answer, though. Cool, he decided to explain the infinite regress. Oh, some people found his tone or approach patronizing, and thought he could have taken the time to go into more detail about magnets instead. Difference of opinion.

Also, at the risk of being controversial: the clip is less valuable if you already know more about magnetism than he explains in the video, and if you're already familiar with the regressive argument. I like Feynman, have read several of his books and am planning on reading the Gleick biography when I can get around to it, but a lot of the love for this seems to come as much from that it's him saying it as much as what is actually said. On the other hand, perhaps I'm just biased because I see these clips getting reposted somewhere or another every so often, and it loses its magic eventually.

In Feynman's defense, the BBC audience the show was created for was probably less sophisticated than the 2015 HN audience, and since it has become such a popular clip, he clearly did something right. :)

> Also, at the risk of being controversial: the clip is less valuable if you already know more about magnetism than he explains in the video, and if you're already familiar with the regressive argument.

I can't see any possible way in which that statement would be controversial. That you felt you had to couch such a statement in a preemptive defense says a lot about how little time many folks take to think before criticising. :(

> [P]erhaps I'm just biased because I see these clips getting reposted [often so they lose their] magic eventually.

True. I know of very few things that retain their magic after being replayed for the billionth time.

> While he does give an answer at around 5:30, it's a pretty small part of the response.

But he does give a good answer to the question. Your statement indicated that you held the opinion that he never answered the question, choosing instead to deflect the original question and answer another, unrelated one of his choosing.

Given that the tone of the thread is "At least one person thinks that Feynman is being a condescending jerk.", you might see why I thought that a statement that supported that conclusion but was based on a basic misunderstanding of the material warranted a clarifying response.

> Imo, there are many possible ways to explain why a magnetic force is felt to a lay-audience, even touching on more advanced aspects like magnetism as a relativistic by-product of moving charges or dipole moments created by orbiting electrons.

That wouldn't have been a correct answer. In permanent magnets, most of the dipole moment comes from electron spin, not angular momentum. Angular momentum alone can't produce a permanent magnet.

> He could have simply stated that the question can be answered with varying degrees of sophistication, but an ultimate "why" is not to be found.

I think you didn't understand the subject. It's not that Feynman thinks he doesn't know "the ultimate why" but only that there isn't a simple analogy he can use to answer the question: sometimes to answer something correctly you have to provide enough details, and that's what he claims he can't do to the "uninitiated" listener as long as his goal is to do that "correctly." He does this intentionally, not because he's a poor teacher, but to present that fact that for some level of understanding it's necessary to invest much more time.

I see however that people are certainly more satisfied with a bad answer than somebody telling them "it's to hard for you to understand it." The bad answers even to that question are available a dime a dozen.

If Feynman didn't know of a better analogy, why didn't he just say so? That would have been more interesting and useful than a sermon.

    I see however that people are certainly more satisfied
    with a bad answer than somebody telling them "it's to
    hard for you to understand it."

Why do you assume I, or the interviewer, was looking for an easy answer? This whole discussion wasn't intended as an argumentation, but rather as a statement of opinion. It could have ended up there but people want to be "right" when there's no such thing. Either you find his behaviour offensive/undeserved/useless or you don't.

> > I see however that people are certainly more satisfied with a bad answer

> Why do you assume I, or the interviewer, was looking for an easy answer?

I don't assume that. I wrote bad. Bad != easy.

As I watched the interview the first time, my first thought was also "he doesn't answer the question" (so "people (who) are certainly more satisfied" included me at that moment!) but then as I've concentrated on what he said, I was glad that he did it that way.

Ha! Well, I'm sure you understood what I meant, and your assumptions about me can't be clearer. It's just tiring that people assume so much. It derails conversations.

> ...your assumptions about me can't be clearer.

I see you saying this a bunch in your replies to this thread.

It might be time for you to step away from the thread for a few hours, then go back and level-headedly re-read it, starting with wtallis's post and working your way through each sub-thread before making any more replies. You might see other people's replies in an entirely new context.

Please try to look in the mirror before accusing other people to derail the conversation through false assumptions. Just a few examples:

"If Feynman didn't know of a better analogy, why didn't he just say so?"

--> This is pretty much exactly what he was saying.

"I assume you're talking about the interviewer and not me."

--> Why would you assume that? You are the one using words such as arrogant, patronizing and jerk without actually explaining what it is you find offensive.

"I'm of the opinion that Feynman didn't teach him a lesson with his speech and analogies."

There's a lot to learn from this particular monologue. The most important lesson here is that human understanding about the laws of nature is hard work and cannot be boiled down to nice 1min snippets. That the interviewer or the viewer didn't learn anything from this, is again your assumption. Stating that this is your opinion also doesn't make sense - why have an opinion about the impression other people get from something? It's perfectly valid to say that you didn't take away anything from it or that Feynman's speech doesn't fit your taste or even that it is, in your opinion, of low quality, but doing a statement that could be statistically measured and hiding behind an 'opinion' in order to not do the actual work, is just lazy.

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