Everything that he said made sense. But like a lot of highly educated people who have to varying extents lost their way, he gets tangled up in a lot of details and fails to back up and regain the perspective of the bigger picture. Here’s the simple answer and the pure naked truth. Ready? The bottom line is that nobody knows. When I was in a physics class in college back in… 1979(?), I asked a physics professor a similar question. We were talking about how a tube (think of a pipe organ, or a flute or clarinet) will resonate at a given wavelength of sound, given the length of the tube. I asked the simple question: Why does that particular wavelength resonate in that particular length of tube? The professor pointed to the equation that he had written on the chalkboard, and said “That’s why”. To which I replied, “No, the equation just describes what we have observed. But why does it do it?” I had to ask the question about three time before the professor finally got what I was asking, at which point he said, “Oh. Because God made it that way.” Which was just a way of admitting that nobody know WHY it does, it. We’ve just noticed that it does it, and scientist have made up stories to explain what they observe. As long as their story accurately predicts the world that they observe, they hold onto the same story. As soon as they start noticing things that their story doesn’t account for, the HONEST scientist will admit that the story that they have fabricated isn’t accurate, and they will start looking for a better “theory” or “story” to account for what is empirically observed. Here in a nutshell is all of physics and science: 1. Newton noticed apples falling and created the story of gravity to explain it. 2. Many people have contributed to the theory or “story” of electrical and magnetic forces, and the “story” has been refined to the point that we have been able to do some pretty awesome things in manipulating magnetic and electric fields. Originally electric forces (aka fields) were thought to be unrelated to Magnetic forces (aka fields). In the early 1800s a man named Maxwell discovered that they are in fact related, and invented/discovered Maxwell’s equations showing the relationship between electricity and magnetism, and henceforth the body of knowledge was combined and referred to as “electromagnetism”. One story (theory, or set of equations) is able to explain everything we observe. 3. Later on, as subatomic research progressed, two new stories or “theories” had to be invented to describe what was observed. These two new theories had to do with “strong nuclear” forces and “weak nuclear forces”. So. The four forces that are recognized in modern physics are the gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear and weak nuclear forces. We have “stories” to explain each of these, but not one unified theory that explains them all in one neat, slick, interwoven theory or “story”. Einstein attempted to discover a Unified Field Theory that would be one story that could successfully describe all of the forces that have been “named” in nature into one cohesive “theory” or “story”. (Just like Maxwell successfully combines the “story” of electricity and the “story” of magnetism into one “unified” theory of Electromagnetism. He was not successful in doing so, and in fact, nobody has been able to do it yet. So, the simple, truthful answer that Feynman could have/ should have given is: “We just don’t know WHY two magnets attract each other. They just do. We can tell you a lot about what we have observed, and we can certainly manipulate matter into making and using magnets”. We learn more every year about the interaction of one type of matter with another, and the stories that we have invented to explain what we see are pretty impressive, and I can tell you the story that we have put together to explain what we see. Bu when all is said and done, we really don’t know why. Even if we were to successfully formulate a Unified Field Theory that would tie in together all of the four forces that we have theorized, and we could completely understand HOW everything works, and even if we could explain everything in the most elemental building blocks of nature, we still wouldn’t know WHY. It just is. And you know what? Even if we thought that we were at the most elemental level of the physical universe, chances are that we wouldn’t be. Chances are that we will find that it is a never-ending onion that just goes on forever regardless of how many layers we peel back. We’ve thought we were at the end before. “Atom” is from a Greek word that means “can’t be split”. Just look at pictures of Hiroshima in 1945 to see if they got that one right.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Aug 2013 04:24:34 +0000
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