At first I was impressed with that video. Then I felt he does not have an answer and unnecessarily gets edgy with it, because question is valid.

I just watched it. I don't think he's edgy.

You can't explain it in terms of anything else, which was sorta my original point. Maybe he could have been more touchy-feely in his answer, but that wasn't his nature.

Hmm I think he's merely explaining what physics is and is not. Physics isn't really answering "why" questions, at least not ones with infinite scope.

Feynman grapples with the question the same way we would grapple with a question from a child: "why is the sky blue?" If you drill down into the explanation, you ultimately reach a statement that everyone just accepts as true, or you simply end with, "no one knows".

The way Feynman answered it looked extremely condescending and anti curiousity. Being pedantic for no reason. When answering you should try to guesstimate what the asker who is not an expert in your field is looking for and then start explanation relative from there.

At certain point, yes, you do have to say that either you don't know or humans haven't figured it out yet.

I took it very differently. I took it as him encouraging curiosity, because his point was, if you are curious, and nobody's explanation is satisfying you, then you should go research it yourself and be the first one to be able to explain it to the level you were looking for.

It's Richard Feynmann. He wasn't gonna be like "Magnets attract and repel because the spins of the electrons in atoms in the magnet are preferentially aligned which causes a macroscopic dipole in the magnetic field", and just leave it at that, like he just shared de-facto science gospel, because he doesn't want to assume that you won't ask something like "why do aligned electron spins create a macroscopic magnetic field?" or "Why do electrons spin?" or "is a magnetic monopole possible?"

He is teaching the core of curiosity itself. You can ask as many questions you can think of, but if you're not happy with the answers, then there's no other option than to go out there and do your own science. He is one of the smartest physicists of the last century and he is telling you that you don't have to take his word for it, he will not be able to answer everything for you and nobody will. And hopefully you are still curious after that.

Having read some of his lectures, and his autobiography, he was anything but anti-curiosity in him or in others. Watch that through the lens of someone who valued nothing more than asking questions and it might come across differently.

> he does not have an answer

Well, yeah. That's the whole point.

The additional important point, of course, is that there are many more 'Why' questions to be asked (often more interesting, and more important than corner cases like human-scale magnetism) that do not get asked just because of familiarity. Familiarity however is not understanding, and it is the same as simplicity.

He could simply say so.

He does repeatedly. And continues to explain why there is no satisfying answer, because we normally stop asking "why" once we reach a level of familiarity. That level of familiarity to the layperson is different between electromagnetism and slippery ice.

I see what you did there.

In similar vein, the following question is very apt. Please read the question because it captures all of our intuition when we try to understand something.

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/46573/what-are-t...

What are strings made of?

One answer is that it is only meaningful to answer this question if the answer has physical consequences. Popularly speaking, string theory is supposed to be the innermost Russian doll of modern physics, and there are no more dolls inside that we can explain it in terms. However, we may be able to find equivalent formulations.

> you have asked me a question so dumb

You must have missed the part where he says that it's an excellent question.

> he was smart and other people were dumb

But he was smart. A lot smarter than you and me and the vast majority of people. He was also pretty humble about it, once famously saying that if he couldn't explain something to a freshman it's because he himself didn't understand it.