Feynman: Magnets (and Why?) FUN TO IMAGINE 4/ higher quality version!

i can't help but tack on my favorite Feynman video, on magnets: [VIDEO] i'm just mesmerized by his answer, that without an understood context, it's not at all easy to explain how magnets work. his riff for 8 minutes on this is just a joy to watch.

I disagree! I think fields are very intuitive and it's everything else that's nonsensical! Magnetism isn't made of anything. It is a field, and it's one your can interact with directly. Compare that with, say, table salt. "What's table salt made of?" Uh. It's made of atoms entirely unrelated to salt, like sodium and chlorine. "What are atoms made of?" Uh. They're made of tiny electric particles zipping around at relativistic speeds but bound together by forces like magnetism. Richard Feynman does a better job than me of describing this exact problem in one of my favorite physics videos of all time: [VIDEO]

I linked the "why do magnets do that?" interview elsewhere in the comments, but if anyone else missed it I highly recommend it: [VIDEO]

It's an easy mistake to make, to have incorrect pedagogy around the concept of temperature, and Feynman was fanatical about correct pedagogy. This is always good: [VIDEO]

> But the relationship between brain chemistry and consciousness is at best correlating certain conscious states with certain neurological states. How ironic that you would say that in a thread about Daniel Dennett's passing. You have obviously not read "Consciousness Explained." > And QFT explaining laws of nature would be strange considering QFT is included in the laws of nature. You should watch this: [VIDEO] > there are philosophical arguments as to why there must be an ultimate, necessary explanation Yes, obviously. There are arguments for why the earth must be flat too. Why should I care about either? They're just wrong .

You asked the question, "Why is the hard problem a problem?" There's a documentary where someone asked Richard Feynman why magnets work, he spends almost 10 minutes talking about how a scientist assigns meaning to a question: [VIDEO] "When you explain a 'Why', you have to be in some framework where you allow things to be true." So what I would say is that people generally allow Cartesian Dualism to be "true" and that's the thing that needs to be challenged. Sometimes this is called Nondualism or Nonduality. If you look at it that way, the idea that the consciousness problem is an appropriate area for inquiry seems like a straightforward idea. As far as Carl Sagan being wrong, he was big on the idea that our subjective minds are just a thing that hydrogen atoms do, if you give them billions of years to do it. But he never came out as a Strict Materialist. He also liked to poke holes in religion but never came out as an Atheist. Yes, he was being clever and cute about it. But I don't think that makes him wrong, just that he was onto something more subtle about the nature of what we are. Human beings are a way for the universe to know itself.

> If photon is not waving something, then it's not a wave. No, you’ve simply hit the limits of needing/wanting to understand something in terms of something else similar or more familiar. Makes the same point on a related matter: [VIDEO]

Not quite. It was declared useless to think about precisely because physics can't answer the most fundamental question of "Why". Richard Feynman went off on an interviewer for asking "Why are they doing that?" (regarding magnetic attraction/repulsion) precisely for this reason. [0] He considers it a waste of time to consider, because you fundamentally can't make meaningful progress on the problem with our current tools and understanding, and it's possible that no amount of tools or understanding can reach the bottom-most turtle. There are some things we may simply never know. [VIDEO]