here was a Nobel laureate telling me that he didn’t really understand it either
Analogies that were meant to “help understand” reality had in fact supplanted it ... ts entire aim was to pretend that science is not mysterious.
I've noticed that people at the top of their field in computing tend to have that humility, too. It's a contrast to those who insist that their way is the only way, that what they see is all there is to see. Computing is also mysterious.
I'm not a scientist and I don't play one on TV, but I've read Feynman's two auto-biographical books, "Surely You're Joking Mr.Feynman" and "What do you care what other people think - further adventures of a curious character" and they are both very well worth reading. What I didn't know until now was the sheer volume of writing he did in his lifetime. A search on bookfinder.com comes up with literally dozens of books.
"Professor, please give me an approximate description of the electromagnetic waves, even though it may be slightly innacurate, so that I too can see them as well as I can see almost-invisible angels. Then I will modify the picture to the necessary abstraction.”
"I’m sorry I can’t do that for you. I don’t know how. I have no picture of this electromagnetic field that is in any sense accurate. (…) So if you have some difficulty in making such a picture, you should not be worried that your difficulty is unusual."
Yeah honest, and he could also be wrong. What's wrong with a wave picture like disturbances in the air or water? It's not perfect, not by a long shot, but all you need is something useful.
To an extent I agree with the blog author when he says these analogies tend to 'supplant reality.' Of course their entire aim is "to pretend that science is not mysterious". Math is the only language for understanding these concepts but relating them to the human experience helps (many people, probably most) in understanding. It's not our fault that he's never studied physics & prefers to read the cliffsnotes versions.
In the book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman," he talks about needing a concrete example of any abstract system he was taking a new look at; this would help him intuit problems or inconsistencies faster than he could work them out precisely on paper.
I think this kind of concrete example is qualitatively different from an analogy or other way of visualizing the full system. The former helps more in specific circumstances, while the latter gives a warm, happy, and likely incorrect feeling of understanding.
I think the EM field properties are somewhat peculiar even before you get to experimental results that force you to quantize the field. Granted, the EM field is not so weird that understanding the general properties of more tangible waves isn't helpful. E.g., I learned a lot from the ripple tank experiments and demonstrations in my high school physics classes, demonstrating properties like diffraction and the tendency not to scatter from too-small obstacles. That kind of stuff applies nicely to EM waves. But that general familiarity with waviness didn't prepare me for things like relativistic invariance. And historically, I'm in good company there: various sharp 19th century physicists were misled about EM by pursuing the analogy with the more tangible waves they were familiar with.
