Feynman: Magnets FUN TO IMAGINE 4 But see NEW UPDATED file at https://tinyurl.com/ycphc432

Of anyone I've read or seen (in person or from videos), Feynman has the best fundamental grasp of meta-knowledge. By meta-knowledge, for lack of a better term, I mean understanding what it means to know something. mhartl has already posted this excellent video: [VIDEO] , where he explains what the word "why" means in scientific inquiry. When we answer a "why" question, we don't really explain a concept in its entirety. At best, we're able to remove a layer of skin off the onion, but no one has ever really reached the center. I suppose science at it's heart is really just the elucidation of intermediate cause and effect scenarios. For the question "why did the ball fall?", "Jimmy dropped it" is a perfectly valid answer. So is "Jimmy's motor neurons passed an action potential threshold, causing the muscles in his wrist to contract". So is "the ball moved along the curvature of space caused by the earth". How far do we go?

For those who think this doesn't sound at least a little bit like Feynman, I highly recommend this video: [VIDEO]

Sometimes it's not always possible to explain something in sufficient detail to someone who has no concept of what you are trying to explain. Feynman explains this really well when trying to answer a question about magnets: "Of course, it's an excellent question. But the problem, you see, when you ask why something happens, how does a person answer why something happens? For example, Aunt Minnie is in the hospital. Why? Because she went out, slipped on the ice, and broke her hip. That satisfies people. It satisfies, but it wouldn't satisfy someone who came from another planet and who knew nothing about why when you break your hip do you go to the hospital... when you explain a why, you have to be in some framework that you allow something to be true. Otherwise, you're perpetually asking why." "I can't explain that attraction in terms of anything else that's familiar to you. For example, if we said the magnets attract like if rubber bands, I would be cheating you. Because they're not connected by rubber bands. I'd soon be in trouble. And secondly, if you were curious enough, you'd ask me why rubber bands tend to pull back together again, and I would end up explaining that in terms of electrical forces, which are the very things that I'm trying to use the rubber bands to explain. So I have cheated very badly, you see." The key quote being: "I really can't do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else you're more familiar with, because I don't u

I stopped reading after it appeared he was advocating collapse theory. About the only non-confusing quantum mechanics I've read so far that's been light on math has been Feynman's stuff like QED and this series: [LINK] On a meta-note, I don't really think this is anything but noise. If you want to really, really understand the physics, you have to do the math, and if you just want a high-level concept I don't see how in the space of a single reddit post you could take away loads of confusion or adequately explain a concept without cheating the person. Here's Feynman's take on magnets (really, on answering 'why' questions): [VIDEO]

Here is Richard Feynman's answer to a similar question (this isn't about gravity but about this type of question): [VIDEO]

Any specialized field becomes obscure to the uninitiated. While it may be possible to use metaphors to give them a glimpse into the field, it's ultimately a false picture. And so, analogies should be used to whet appetites, not attempt to explain expert knowledge. Feynman on magnetism: "I can't explain that attraction in any of the terms that's familiar to you. For example, if we said that magnets attract as if they were connected by rubber bands, I would be cheating you[...] and if you were curious enough, you would ask me why rubber bands tend to pull back together again and I would end up having to explain that in terms of electrical forces." [VIDEO]

It is all a matter of where we stop asking questions. Mostly, good philosophers keep on pushing and end up with something ridiculously hard like Chalmer's hard problem of consciousness. But most of us refuse to recognize that this is even a problem: the brain produces it. Just because we answer one of (what,when,why,how,where) does not mean the whole problem is solved. Feynman on a related problem : [VIDEO] Unfortunately, this tradition of honest and deep questions and answers has mostly sort of tapered off...

Yeah, I believe he proved a correspondence between the arrows and the Schroedinger equation (not in that book) at some point (and it's not hard to come up with a character of the proof). The grandparent is referring to something like this video, though, which you mentioned at the end: [VIDEO] Bringing in arrows where they don't belong, or in the magnet case "rubber bands", is cheating the asker. I'm not familiar enough with GR to know if arrows are a useful representation like they are with complex amplitudes.