Feynman’s Real Question Was “What Do You Mean?”
How Feynman repairs a question before he answers it.
I first watched the Richard Feynman magnet interview in 2015, late at night, the way people fall into YouTube rabbit holes when their brain refuses to shut off. I’ve always been drawn to physics, especially theoretical physics, because it demands a kind of honesty that most public discourse avoids. You don’t get to win with your feelings. You don’t get to hide behind a slogan. You have to build a coherent model.
That’s why the magnet clip stuck with me.
The interviewer holds up two magnets and asks what most of us have wondered at some point: What is that “feeling” between them? The push. The pull. The invisible insistence.
And Feynman doesn’t answer the “why” first.
He answers the meaning first.
He pauses and says, in effect: What do you mean by “the feeling between the magnets”?
Not to be clever. Not to stall. To do the work that makes an answer possible.
That’s the part people miss. The clip is shared with the caption “Richard Feynman. Why.” I think the heavy lifting happens earlier. The moment he refuses to accept a fuzzy question and treats clarity as a form of respect.
Because if you let the question drift, the conversation drifts with it.
And that is the story of our current information environment: same words, different payloads, everyone convinced the other person is being ridiculous.
The moment he changes the room
Here’s the move.
The interviewer says, basically: There’s something there when you push magnets together. What is it?
Feynman replies: What do you mean by that?
He’s not arguing with the curiosity. He’s diagnosing the problem. “Feeling” can mean a tactile sensation in your hands. It can mean a mysterious substance in the air. It can mean a mechanism. It can mean a metaphysical “reason.”
If you don’t decide which one you mean, you don’t get an explanation. You get two people talking in different frames, passing sound through each other.
Clarity is the price of admission for “why.”
This is exactly what the What Do You Mean? series is about: the invisible infrastructure that lets people share a world long enough to think together.
And Feynman shows something else that matters right now: the emotional temperature of a conversation often rises because the question was vague, not because anyone was malicious.
One person thinks they’re asking for mechanism.
The other hears an existential demand.
Then we get heat, posture, performance.
Feynman defuses that by repairing the question before he touches the answer.
The fastest way to escalate is to answer the wrong question with confidence.
“Why” questions have floors
Once Feynman has the question stabilized, he gives a second lesson that belongs in every civic conversation: every “why” rests on assumptions you agreed to stop questioning.
He tells a story about “Aunt Minnie” in the hospital. People accept a certain level of “why” as satisfying because they share background knowledge about hips, hospitals, ice, gravity, and social roles. Change the listener (he imagines someone from another planet) and suddenly your explanation collapses. The “why” depends on a shared framework.
That’s a brutal truth about public discourse:
We often argue about “why” while hiding the fact that we don’t share a floor.
One person’s floor is “markets.”
Another person’s floor is “justice.”
Another person’s floor is “God.”
Another person’s floor is “history.”
Another person’s floor is “my lived experience.”
If you don’t surface the floor, the conversation becomes a spiraling ladder of “why” that ends in contempt.
Feynman doesn’t pretend he can solve that.
He says, plainly, that explanations bottom out. At some level, you hit fundamentals, things you take as elements of the world, at least until you have a deeper theory. In magnet talk, you run into electromagnetic force. You can go deeper if you’re trained. You still hit bedrock eventually.
It’s called epistemic hygiene.
It’s also a direct challenge to the culture of instant certainty.
If you can’t name the floor, you can’t build a shared explanation.
The “cheating” principle
This is my favorite part of the interview, and it’s a warning label for the whole internet.
Feynman says he can’t explain magnet attraction by comparing it to rubber bands, because that would be cheating. It would sound familiar. It would feel satisfying. It would smuggle in a mechanism you haven’t earned. Then, the moment you push the analogy, you end up back at the same forces you were trying to explain.
That’s the whole modern persuasion economy.
“Like a rubber band.”
“Like a virus.”
“Like a parasite.”
“Like a war.”
“Like slavery.”
“Like Nazis.”
“Like communism.”
A metaphor that wins the room can still be cheating.
The point is not “never use metaphor.” The point is: don’t use a metaphor to avoid the hard work of mechanism. Don’t use familiarity to replace understanding.
Feynman is modeling a different ethic: if an explanation makes you feel smart while making you less accurate, it’s not an explanation. It’s a performance.
An analogy can be true enough to teach, and false enough to mislead.
60-second tool: The Feynman Reset
Use this when a conversation starts getting heated quickly, at work, in civic meetings, in comment threads, and in family group texts.
Step 1: Pin the word.
What term is doing the most work right now?
Step 2: Name the meaning layer.
Are we stuck on definition, mechanism, scope, evidence, implication, or values?
Step 3: Ask one clarifying question and stop talking.
Let the other person repair their meaning.
Steal-this scripts:
“When you say X, what do you mean by that in this context?”
“What would X look like in practice?”
“Walk me through the mechanism—how does X lead to Y?”
“Which cases count, and which cases don’t?”
“What would we need to see to agree we’re right or wrong?”
This is repair-by-design. You’re changing the conditions so shared reality can re-form.
Why it matters
Feynman’s magnet clip keeps circulating because it scratches an itch people can’t name: the feeling that we live in a world where everyone talks, and nobody explains.
We’re saturated with claims. We’re starved for mechanisms.
And that gap makes people easier to manipulate.
A high-compression meme doesn’t need to be accurate. It just needs to be legible in two seconds and identity-safe to share. It offers the comfort of a clean story. Feynman offers something harder: a disciplined curiosity that refuses to pretend.
He’s doing what every leader, educator, journalist, and organizer needs to do right now:
Slow the frame down.
Clarify the question.
Separate certainty from understanding.
Admit the limits of explanation without collapsing into cynicism.
This connects to a cognitive pattern that shows up in my research: people often believe they understand complex systems until they’re asked to explain the mechanism step-by-step. Then confidence drops. Sometimes extremism drops with it. That matters for civic life. It suggests a path out of ideological shouting: move from slogans to mechanisms.
No “gotchas,” just a shared experiment.
A demand for mechanism is a quiet antidote to moral panic.
Quick Scan: copy/paste lines for real life
Use these in Slack, meetings, community forums, editor chats, and comment threads.
“I want to make sure I’m tracking before I react.”
“Define X the way you’re using it here.”
“What’s the concrete example you have in mind?”
“Which cases count as X?”
“What’s the causal path—step by step?”
“What would count as evidence on this?”
“Are you implying X, or am I adding that?”
“What outcome are you aiming for?”
“What constraint are you optimizing for?”
“What would change your mind?”
Carry it into your week
Pick one setting where you usually rush—work, civic discourse, or online.
Then run this field test three times before Sunday:
Identify the “magnet word” (the term doing the work).
Ask one mechanism or scope question.
Stop. Let the other person answer.
Track three signals:
Did the temperature drop?
Did the next turn clarify or escalate?
Did you notice your own assumptions earlier than usual?
If you want, post your example as a Note. Real scenes sharpen the series.
Next: As promised in the last piece
We’ll tackle: when questions are used as weapons. How do we recognize a bad-faith “just asking questions” tactic and respond without taking the bait? How can we keep dialogue productive when questions are meant to provoke? That’s up next in the series.