Feynman and, maybe, Maimonides

Dave sent me this quote a few days ago, along with a video he made. He's a little tied up in preparations for a secret gold-digging trip to Kansas (was that too much info, Dave?) but I wanted to get it up here, anyway. 

"I have asked you to imagine these electric and magnetic fields. What do you do? Do you know how? How do I imagine the electric and magnetic field? What do I actually see? What are the demands of scientific imagination? Is it any different from trying to imagine that the room is full of invisible angels? No, its not like imagining invisible angels. It requires a much higher degree of imagination to understand the electromagnetic field than to understand invisible angels. Why? Because to make invisible angels understandable, all I have to do is alter their properties a little bit- I make them slightly visible, and then I can see the shapes of their wings, and bodies, and halos. Once I succeed in imagining a visible angel, the abstraction required- which is to take almost invisible angles and imagine them completely invisible - is relatively easy.

[skipping some stuff]
"When I start describing the magnetic field moving through space, I speak of the E- and B- fields and wave my arms and you may imagine that I can see them. I'll tell you what I see. I see some kind of vague shadowy, wiggling lines-here and there is an E and B written on them somehow, and perhaps some of the lines have arrows on them."

-Feynman (Vol. II 20-8)

Alternatively, it kind of looks like oobleck.

www.stanford.edu/~straussd/oobleck.avi

[end note from Dave]

The quote sort of reminded me of some things I've been studying for my theology exam - in particular, the notes I have from a class on Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed: that ""As to His essence, the only way to describe it is negatively. For instance, He is not physical, nor bound by time, nor subject to change, etc. These assertions do not involve any incorrect notions or assume any deficiency, while if positive essential attributes are admitted it may be assumed that other things coexisted with Him from eternity." Unrestrained anthropomorphism and perception of positive attributes is seen as a transgression as serious as idolatry, because both are fundamental errors in the metaphysics of God's role in the universe, and that is the most important aspect of the world." 

I suppose the reason the Feynman quote reminded me of this was the common theme of the limits of language - perhaps also the ultimate limits of our own imaginations and cognitive abilities.