science

I would argue that the Higgs mechanism is just that: A mechanism for explaining where mass comes from. You could explain charge in a similar way by saying "because the particles are made of a certain amount of up or down quarks".

Neither of these explanations answer the underlying question "but why does the Higgs mechanism give things mass?" or "but why do up/down quarks give things charge?".

My point is that, at some stage, you get to the point of "the Higgs boson has mass because it's an intrinsic property of the Higgs boson", which is tantamount to "they just do".

Mass & gravity are still way easier to understand on a fundamental level, especially since everything has a certain amount of mass and thus affects and is affected by gravity. It's a much simpler concept. ("Natural") magnetism is (so far) very material specific and I don't think I've seen a good explanation as to why exactly. Magnets certainly behave very differently than other materials and that causes this mysticism in people when they think about magnets. Given the still ongoing research into magnetism and related things like superconductivity there's certainly a lot still to learn.

The first time I saw this and he got to the part about your hand not going through the chair, and how magnets just do the same thing at a distance, it was like seeing the Matrix briefly. Definite "oh shit" moment. Also gave me a flashback of Sagan telling me that matter was basically comprised of nothing. By accident Lucas was right - the Force is all around us, binding us. It's all forces.

I love watching Feynman prove icp right.

Well, we do know why they work, but we don't know why the way they work works.

The answer is because everything is lazy, and it's easier to obey the laws of physics than not to. The path of least resistance is real.
Why are the laws of physics the way they are and not different? I have a degree in physics and I still don't know the answer to that, annoyingly.

To that I would answer that things don't "obey the laws of physics" in any greater sense than that the "laws" of physics are principles that we've formulated based on how we've observed that nature behaves.

We have exactly zero proof that there is some inherent property of nature that always and forever will prevent heat from moving from cold to hot, even though that would violate the second law of thermodynamics. It's just that we have never observed a process that violates the second law (people have tried very hard to break this one), and have a decent explanation for why we're not able to break it.

If some process is developed or observed that violates the "laws of physics", that just means we need to figure out where the "laws" are wrong, and revise them, which is how science moves forwards!

So short answer: Things obey the laws of physics, because whenever we observe something that breaks the laws, we revise the laws to allow for the newly observed behaviour.

This is what makes science fundamentally different from most belief systems: The only core principle is that anything can at any time be disproven, and everything we think we know is potentially wrong. By truly internalising that core belief, there's no amount of proof that can turn your worldview upside down, because your core principle is that everything you think you know is potentially wrong, only being a more or less good approximation to the true underlying nature of the universe, which we can never really know anything about.