WHY

Richard Feynman, BBC, Fun to Imagine
1983, 7 min 32 sec

 Filmed as part of the 1983 TV program Fun to Imagine, the interview takes a rather tense turn when the interviewer poses what I’m sure seemed like a very simple question in his head: If you hold two magnets with the same poles close, you’ll feel a force pushing them away, and if they have opposite poles, they will snap together. “What I want to know is, what’s going on between these two bits of metal?” he says, as Feynman does little to mask his annoyance. “Why are they doing that, or how are they doing that?”