Have I ever mentioned that the late Richard Feynman is one of my heroes? This is a perfect example of why — he could have taken the easy way out and given a BS answer that would have satisfied the interviewer, but instead he tried to explain why he couldn’t explain it properly, while giving enough hints that someone familiar enough with science could pursue it further and figure it out.
I know how magnets work… um, magnetism!
(Seriously it involves exchanges of various particles, I used to know but have forgotten the gory details. Probably would make anyone who barely knows about protons and electrons’s head explode. 😉 )
Oh, magnetism! It’s so obvious! Why didn’t I think of that? 😉
Your “exchange” explanation sounds like how it was described to me in high school. My high school also later admitted that the (Bohr?) model of atomic structure that they’d been teaching me for years had been known to be wrong fifty years before, but they keep teaching it because it’s simpler than what modern science has come up with. I suspect that they gave you a version of magnetism that was either known to be wrong or was so simplified that it’s simply wrong too.