Christoph Eberhard

A BBC interviewer asked a Nobel physicist the simplest question in the world: why do two magnets push each other apart. He refused to answer it. What he did instead is the best seven minutes on thinking ever filmed. The man is Richard Feynman, at home in 1983, no blackboard, no notes, sitting in an armchair. He does not dodge because he cannot answer. He dodges because he wants you to see what the question is actually asking. So he takes an ordinary sentence, that a woman slipped on the ice and broke her hip, and starts asking why, and every answer opens another why, until the ground gives way. Then he turns it around on the interviewer with a question about ice that sounds trivial and is not. The point he arrives at is the uncomfortable one. Every explanation is only a translation into something you already accept without explanation. Magnets have no such translation. There is nothing more familiar than magnetism to reduce magnetism to, which is why every answer you were given at school was a picture, not a reason. It matters more now than it did in 1983. Any tool will hand you a fluent answer in a second. Knowing which questions actually have a bottom is the part that is still yours. One question. Seven minutes. It is in the video.