Richard Feynman on why questions
Richard Feynman on why questions
For instance fundamental charges are a lot like positive and negatively-oriented vortices in a fluid, which when they touch cancel each other out and radiate energy away. They're not _exactly_ like that, but they're a lot like it, and that's a model people can understand without knowing the first thing about quantum field theory. Sure, you won't understand from that why like-charges repel each other, not really, but if you play with the analogy for a while it starts to seem why that might be true as well.
(See https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/09/24/samuel-becketts-guide-... for some pictures of this... I wish I had better though.)
Magnetism is quite a bit trickier to explain in this model but it can done with some work. In particular: a charge radiates little linear packets of energy just by existing; when one of these packets hits another charged particle it moves a tick closer or further away (based on +/-). A current/moving charge/magnetic dipole radiates away little spiraling packets of energy which are aligned in the plane orthogonal to the conventional magnetic field; when these hit another charged particle they get rotated a tick.
The issue with giving people an intuitive model that's not at the same level of complexity to the mathematical models, in my experience, is that a lot of people, including out-of-field experts then run with the intuitive model into bizarre territory and treat it as a prediction of the original tested theory. They reason correctly within the simplified world of the analogy but when it clashes with the real world, they dig down and reaffirm their preconceived notions.
On the other hand, I suppose they were never going to honour Cromwell's rule anyway, so maybe it doesn't matter.
His first instinct was to be a dick about it, then he sort of softly walked that back using an excuse about it being a long explanation. In the end, he gave a good answer, he just had to first pretend that it was a pain because of how smart he is and how much he understands.