As someone who took to learning more about the sciences later in my life—really, meaning after my collegiate career had concluded and I was off on my own—I have run into a consistent problem in the course of my learning: my inability to simply accept a scientific fact as such and then move on.
Like a small child, the “why” question is always lurking on my mind. The greatest scientific pleasure I’ve had in the past few years, especially since moving out to Colorado, with its storybook rocks, has been geology. It’s always a pleasure to observe some strange formation or rocky type and to then reference a USGS quadrangle survey and locate a (rough) answer to my question.
This is on the “big” scale of geology—erosion and mountain-building and the stacking, twisting, and distortion of geologic strata. But when it came to the “small” scale, i.e. the atomic structure of rocks and the formation of minerals themselves, I found myself in unfamiliar territory. The “why” question was always waiting in the wings.
One of the topics that confounded me—based on the little that I had read of it—was magnetism. One morning, I pulled up a video that featured noted physicist Richard Feynman, which purported (at least in YouTube title) to be an explanation. The following exchange between the BBC interviewer and Feynman ensued (abbreviated and condensed for clarity):
Interviewer:
If you get hold of two magnets and you push them you can feel this pushing between them turn around the other way in it and they slam together now what is it—the feeling between those two magnets?
Feynman:
What do you mean what’s the feeling?
Interviewer:
Well, I mean that the sensation is that there’s something there when you push these two magnets together—
Feynman:
Listen to my question—what is the meaning when you say that there’s there’s a “feeling”? Of course, you feel it—now what do you want to know?
Interviewer:
What I want to know is what’s going on between these two bits of these two bits of metals.
Feynman:
That’s an excellent question! Okay, but the problem that you’re asking, you see, is when you ask why something happens. How does a person answer why something happens?
For example, Aunt Minnie is in hospital. Why? Because she slipped—she went out and she slipped on the ice and broke her hip. That satisfies it people if it’s ice, but it wouldn’t satisfy someone who came from another planet who knew nothing about things.
[…]
If you try to follow anything up, you go deeper and deeper in various directions. For example, you go, ‘Why did she slip on the ice?’ Well, ice is slippery—everybody knows that, no problem, but you asked why is ice slippery. That’s kind of curious. Ice is extremely slippery—it’s very interesting. You say, ‘How does it work?’ You can either say, ‘I’m satisfied that you’ve answered me “ice is slippery”’ and that explains it—or you could go out and say, ‘Why is ice slippery?’ and then you’re involved with something, because there aren’t many things as slippery as ice.
It’s very hard to get greasy stuff that’s sort of wet but a solid that’s so slippery. In the case of ice, when you stand on it, they say that momentarily, the pressure melts the ice a little bit, so you get a sort of instantaneous water surface on which you’re slipping. Why on ice and not on other things? Because ice expands when it freezes, so the pressure tries to undo the expansion and melts it. […]
All right, I’m not answering your question, but I’m telling you how difficult the why questionis. You have to know what it is that you’re permitted to understand and allow to be understood and known and what it is you’re not. You’ll notice in this example that the more I ask why, it gets interesting afterwards. My idea is that the deeper a thing is, the more interesting it is, and we could go even further and say, ‘Why did she fall down when she slipped?’ That has to do with gravity, which involves the plants and everything else—never mind! It goes on and on.
Now when you ask, for example, why two magnets repel, there are many different levels. It depends on whether you’re a student of physics or an ordinary person that doesn’t know anything. If you’re somebody who doesn’t know anything at all about physics, all I can say is that there’s a magnetic force that makes them repel. You say, ‘But that’s very strange, because I don’t feel that kind of force in other circumstances.’
[…]
[Magnetic force] is just going to be one of the things you’ll just have to take as an element in the world. […] I can’t explain the attraction in terms of anything else that’s familiar to you. For example, if we say the magnets attract as if they were connected by rubber bands, I would be cheating you, because they’re not connected by rubber bands. I should be in trouble if you ask me about the nature of the bands and, secondly, if we were curious enough, you ask me why rubber bands tend to pull back together again, I would end up explaining that in terms of the electrical forces that are the very things that I’m trying to use rubber bands to explain. So, I’m not going to be able to give you and answer to why magnets attract each other except to tell you that they do and to tell you that that’s one of the elements in the world of the different kinds of forces. I can’t really do a good job explaining magnetic forces in terms of something else that you’re familiar with because I don’t understand it in terms of anything else that you’re more familiar with.
I love this exchange, because Feynman is voicing something that I needed to hear:
“It is just going to be one of the things you’ll just have to take as an element in the world.”
Essentially: move on. Unless you’re willing to commit to years of study, any attempt (as an untaught physicist like me) to understand something like magnetism is futile. Even a famous physicist like Feynman is no help to me—truly “getting” the “why” of magnetism demands training and a knowledge base that I just don’t have.
Why is this something I needed to hear? (If I may be permitted to ask a “why” question.)
I think it’s related to the process of getting older. As I’ve aged, I see that my options have narrowed. This is both in obvious areas—I’ll likely never be a professional athlete at this point, for instance—but also in less obvious ones—I’ll never really “get” magnetism.
This latter example is owing less to latent ability—if I really applied myself, I’m sure I could develop the physics knowledge necessary to follow Feynman’s unbroached explanation of magnetism—and more to circumstance. It’s not as though I couldn’t quit my job and devote myself to the study of physics. It’s feasible, but I have commitments to my family that supersede any harebrained scheme that results in me really “getting” magnetism. Far better for me, as Feynman puts it, to just “take as an element in the world” and live my life.
Taylor Coe 