Comment by gambiter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gambiter | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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