“But I really can’t do a good job—any job—of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else that you’re more familiar with, because I don’t understand it in terms of anything else that you’re more familiar with.”
What do we mean by “understanding”? Things are always understood in terms of other things already familiar to you. Sometimes the distance between everyday experience and a given idea is too big for immediate explanations, but even otherwise grounding the idea in everyday experience may be cheating, since everyday experience may result from the phenomenon that you are trying to understand this way in the first place!
Seems relevant: Feynman on understanding.
What do we mean by “understanding”? Things are always understood in terms of other things already familiar to you. Sometimes the distance between everyday experience and a given idea is too big for immediate explanations, but even otherwise grounding the idea in everyday experience may be cheating, since everyday experience may result from the phenomenon that you are trying to understand this way in the first place!