Richard Feynman gave what I consider to be the best possible answer to questions like this:
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.
At certain point, yes, you do have to say that either you don't know or humans haven't figured it out yet.
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.
Well, yeah. That's the whole point.
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.
His attitude really bugs me, and it’s on full display in this clip - everything about this to me says “I am so smart and you have asked me a question so dumb that I don’t know how to dumb down my answer for you, now I will show how smart I am in the course of explaining how dumb your question is in excruciating detail, so next time you’ll know not to waste my smart time with dumb questions.”
Instead of playing games and being evasive and ‘owning’ the interviewer, he could have just worked with the guy to clarify the question and to talk through the guy’s understanding - he didn’t try to do that, though, and you can tell how delighted he is for this chance to show the guy up. His autobiography is written the same way, it’s a series of anecdotes about times where he was smart and other people were dumb. Really rubs me the wrong way.
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.