Feynman was a bit pedantic sometimes.
Comment on average physics student vs POTUS 47
pmk@piefed.ca 13 hours agoWhenever I think about magnets I remember this Feynman interview where someone asks him why magnets behave the way they do, and he says that to answer a “why"-question you need a foundation where something is agreed to be true, and it seems like for electromagnetic forces we end up in " because that’s how the universe is apparently”.
Fedizen@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
oce@jlai.lu 7 hours ago
This seems to be easily said of anyone trying to popularize science philosophy.
echodot@feddit.uk 6 hours ago
That is sort of how the universe operates though. You can have a greater and greater understanding of the underlying principles of physics but eventually you do get to “that just how it is”. Why is there no such thing as a negative photon, apparently we just can’t have a negative excitation in the photon field, no one knows why.
porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 12 hours ago
Sure, but between nothing and the axioms of the standard model we end up with a fairly comprehensive description which can predict how different kinds of magnets behave in a wide variety of situations.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
That’s knowing how to use it, not how it works.
porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 10 hours ago
No, the theory of electromagnetism and by extension physics in general is knowing how it works. How to use it is engineering, a different set of knowledge which we also have some of.