He's not saying that he "knows things in so much detail that he can't imagine wrongful analogies". He's saying that "magnetic force is different from anything you are familiar with", so you have to learn it as something new, not by analogy.
Feynman does (explain a little bit of) Quantum Mechanics by analogy (photons are spinning clocks), but goes on the say you have to learn a truly ne wmodel to understand more deeply.
> It is the most common way of trying to cope with novelty: by means of metaphors and analogies we try to link the new to the old, the novel to the familiar. Under sufficiently slow and gradual change, it works reasonably well; in the case of a sharp discontinuity, however, the method breaks down: though we may glorify it with the name "common sense", our past experience is no longer relevant, the analogies become too shallow, and the metaphors become more misleading than illuminating.
There are lots of gems in that essay, such as this:
> We can view the program as what turns the general-purpose computer into a special-purpose symbol manipulator, and does so without the need to change a single wire (This was an enormous improvement over machines with problem-dependent wiring panels.) I prefer to describe it the other way round: the program is an abstract symbol manipulator, which can be turned into a concrete one by supplying a computer to it. After all, it is no longer the purpose of programs to instruct our machines; these days, it is the purpose of machines to execute our programs.
Feynman does (explain a little bit of) Quantum Mechanics by analogy (photons are spinning clocks), but goes on the say you have to learn a truly ne wmodel to understand more deeply.
See also: Dijkstra's "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036...
> It is the most common way of trying to cope with novelty: by means of metaphors and analogies we try to link the new to the old, the novel to the familiar. Under sufficiently slow and gradual change, it works reasonably well; in the case of a sharp discontinuity, however, the method breaks down: though we may glorify it with the name "common sense", our past experience is no longer relevant, the analogies become too shallow, and the metaphors become more misleading than illuminating.
There are lots of gems in that essay, such as this:
> We can view the program as what turns the general-purpose computer into a special-purpose symbol manipulator, and does so without the need to change a single wire (This was an enormous improvement over machines with problem-dependent wiring panels.) I prefer to describe it the other way round: the program is an abstract symbol manipulator, which can be turned into a concrete one by supplying a computer to it. After all, it is no longer the purpose of programs to instruct our machines; these days, it is the purpose of machines to execute our programs.