A topic in public science
Read about metaphors in science
Read examples of science metaphors
(Further) Examples of science metaphors:
The original quotes have been paraphrased or edited for brevity below – the links will lead to the full quotation and source.
Some metaphors in scientists’/scholars’ writing about science
Science metaphors in broadcast media and science journalism:
| Topic | Metaphor | Source |
| red giants | Betelgeuse underwent "a sneeze" | Article in the New York Times [discussed here] |
| red giants | Betelgeuse has an "injury" and was "recovering after blowing its top" | NASA website [discussed here] |
| stars | "Across the universe, stars have been dying for millions of years…" | Lord Melvyn Bragg talking on BBC radio show 'In Our Time' [discussed here] |
| stars | "…when it runs out of its fuel at the core, that's when you reach the end of its lifetime and we start going through the death processes" | Prof. Carolin Crawford (University of Cambridge) talking on BBC radio show 'In Our Time' [discussed here] |
| stars | "massive stars … have to chomp through their fuel supply so furiously that they exhaust it more rapidly" | Prof. Carolin Crawford (University of Cambridge) talking on BBC radio show 'In Our Time' [discussed here] |
| stars | "In astronomy, we are dealing with fossils as well, when we look out into the universe, the light has take a long time to reach us, even though light travels very fast, the further out you look, the longer the it's taken to get to you…" | Prof. Andrew Pontzen Professor of Cosmology, UCL, talking on BBC Inside Science |
| supernovae | "part of the supernova explosion we have been talking about, and it carves out a bubble within the interstellar medium" | Prof. Carolin Crawford (University of Cambridge) talking on BBC radio show 'In Our Time' [discussed here] |
| T cells | "The Y-negative cells cause an immune evasive environment in the tumour, and that, if you will, paralyses, the T cells, and exhausts them, makes them tired and ineffective, and this prevents the Y-negative tumour from being rejected, therefore allowing it to grow much better." | Prof. Dan Theodorescu speaking on the Nature Podcast (read about this) |
| T cells | "Exhausted T cells have lost their ability to kill cancer cells, and have lots of proteins on their surface known as checkpoints, which put the brakes on immune responses."" | Nick Petrić Howe speaking on the Nature Podcast (read about this) |
Science metaphors in popular science books:
| Topic | Metaphor | Source |
| antibiotic resistance | "Thankfully the bacteria in question were found to be susceptible to other antibiotics, a fact that prevented them from being the microbial horsemen of the apocalypse." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| antigens | "Three of the HLA [human leukocyte antigens] molecules… take peptides …from within the cell, and display them on the cell's surface … this biological barcode lets the T cell know that it's looking at a self-cell that should be defended, not attacked." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| bacteria | "[Francisco] Mojica made a bold and untested hypothesis – that this planidrome-space system is a bacterial weapon against viruses." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| bacteria | "…this system evolved in an arms race with viruses. Viruses attack bacteria as well as humans, We fend most of them off with our immune system. This bacterial mechanisms …uses a molecular guide and scalpel: the palindromes help form the guides that bring a molecular scalpel to cut the viral DNA to render it harmless." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| bacteria | "…the dark-arts of pus-producing bacteria…" | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| bones | "…bones aren't static structures, they're living leviathans constantly being broken down and rebuilt by the bony equivalent of yin and yang: osteoclasts and osteoblasts." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| cancer | "The immune system not only sculpts the face of cancer cells…" | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| cell death | "Every cell has many caspases within it, all of which are kept well under control in an inactive state. However once the first few are activated they play an epic game of tag, recruiting more and more capsases, amplifying each other's actions and driving the cell ever faster towards death." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| cell death | "…the caspases take an active part in dismantling the cell. They rip apart its internal scaffolding, shred the proteins in the nucleus and put a 'cease and desist' on the cell's DNA repair mechanisms. Death is rapid: within hours of the self-destruct command the cell has set its affairs in order, reduced in size and dismembered itself into small packets that can be devoured by macrophages." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| cell signalling | "Some signals are proactive, for example when cells periscope from their surface a receptor called ULBP (UL16-binding protein). Any NK cell that finds itself shaking hands with a ULBP receptor knows it has found a stressed-out cell. The same is true if the NK cell extends its receptors to the cell only to find it omits parts of the secret-handshake expected from a normal cell." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| chemical reactions | "The superheavy scientists [sic*] had worked out how to perform chemistry on their fleeting children…" [* i.e., scientists working on superheavy elements, not obese scientists] | Kit Chapman, Superheavy. Making and breaking the periodic table |
| chemical signalling | "The witch's brew of communicative chemicals in our bodies…" | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| comets | "Soothsayers and fiction-writers have a case: one day the earth will collide with a bright comet or its dark corpse and the result will be world-wide mayhem." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| comets | "Comets…obtrude because they jaywalk across the paths of planets." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| comets | "After the virgin comet Kohouteck was scrutinised by radio and visible, ultraviolet and infrared light, one could sum up the detectable constituents of comets in general in one word: noisome." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| comets | "But the dust disperses continually and is subject to the same kind of gravitational football from the planets as comets are. In time, the waifs become impossible to identify with their parent comets, and they can encounter the Earth singly at any time." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| comets | "The more times a comet visits the region close to the Sun, the less it will retain its original, and ancient, Solar System secrets, as they are moulted and left floating around in space." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| comet sampling | "The intake pipes for COSAC (Cometary Sampling and Composition) are located on the base of the Philae lander, and those for Ptolemy are located on the top. … COSAC is most likely to have ingested some of the volatiles in the ice-poor dust kicked up during the brief initial touchdown, whereas Ptolemy breathed in the cometary gases higher above the surface…" | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the Solar System |
| comets and meteors | "Comets are sometimes confused with their impetuous kin, the meteors and meteorites that dash into the Earth's upper air from outer space [sic] and either burn up as 'shooting stars' or reach the ground as incandescent lumps of iron, stone and tar." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| complement system | "Genetic studies have also demonstrated the importance of another complement skill: sprinkling C3b on the surface of bacteria makes them much more appetising to microbe-munching cells like macrophages and neutrophils. People with genetic mutations that reduce complement's ability to fulfil this seasoning role suffer from repeated pus-heavy infections in childhood." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects [Read about this book] |
| crators | "The pockmarked surface of the Moon provides evidence to suggest that a range of objects impacted the early Earth-Moon system, and the other rocky planets, plenty of times in the past, allowing ample opportunity for water to have been parachuted in from space." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| CRISPR-Cas [Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats] | "With this technique, scientists can target regions of the genome with two kinds of tools: a molecular scalpel to cut DNA and a guide to bring the scalpel to the right place." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| cytokines | "…some diseases can cause this system to go into overdrive, serving the body with with an overwhelming cytokine spamming." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you. [Read about this book] |
| D.N.A. | "New experiments reveal a multibillion-year history filled with cooperation, repurposing, competition, theft, and war. And that is just what happens inside DNA itself." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| D.N.A. | "Hill, Lettice, and the team started trudging through the entire genome until they saw the signal [of DNA inserted into a mouse]. The snippet inserted was almost a million bases away from the Sonic hedgehog gene. That's an enormous amount of genetic real estate between the site of the mutation and the site of the Sonic gene." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| elementary particles | "By the 1950s, elementary (or seemingly elementary) particles were proliferating, and new 'quantum numbers' were invented to describe them: charge, spin, parity (related to mirror image symmetry), isospin, strangeness, charm (the last a humorous characteristic bestowed on some particles that live a charmed life, meaning that they lasted much longer than expected before decaying into other particles)." | Lindley, David – The Dream Universe. How fundamental physics lost its way |
| elements | "Unlike other drugs, lithium is older than we are, born in the big blast that gave our universe its considerable kick start." | Lauren Slater The Drugs that Changed our Minds. The history of psychiatry in ten treatments. |
| embryonic development | "…apoptosis sculpts and moulds the growing embryo, carving out a mouse or a kitten or a fish, from a tiny ball of cells." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| entropy | "Planck…objected to Boltzmann that if his interpretation of entropy was correct, then the existence of the universe as we know it – in a state very far from equilibrium, with stars churning out energy into empty space, and some of its being greedily taken up on the surfaces of planets to fuel life -seemed very unlikely indeed." | David Lindley – The Dream Universe. How fundamental physics lost its way |
| equation | "Dirac's electron equation was a strange beast, using novelties of mathematics previously unseen in physics to do its job." | David Lindley – The Dream Universe. How fundamental physics lost its way |
| ethics | "…medical ethics is a subject that often seems drier than the dusty remains of Tutankhamun." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| evolution | "The virus was hacked, neutered, and domesticated for a new function in brains." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| evolution | "…multicellular bodies are a confederation of parts that arose at different times, sometimes in different places. These parts, some in conflict, some cooperating, all changing over time fuel the fire of evolution." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| evolution | "Traits can appear in one species only to be borrowed, stolen, and modified for new uses by another. Hosts can inherit a ready-made invention rather than having to build it themselves." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| evolution | "Ever twisting, turning, and at war with itself and external invaders, DNA provides the fuel for evolution's changes. | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| evolution | With cells and genetic material of different species merging and genes continually duplicating and repurposing, life's history flows more like a braided and meandering river than a straight channel. | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| gene regulation | "For a gene to become active, a molecular game of Twister needs to happen." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| gene regulation | "Recall that there are molecular switches across the genome that, under the right circumstances, turn genes on and off. Most of these switches lie right next to the genes they activate. Since progesterone is the trigger for the formation of decidual stromal cells, then we could reasonably assume that the switches would be responsive to it. The genetic switches would be tethered to a sequence that recognized [sic] progesterone. When progesterone was present, the switch, the switch would activate and the gene would make protein." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| gene regulation | "…each genetic switch had the telltale signature of a jumping gene" | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| genetics | "The patterns of gene activity were pointing to a kind of biological cut-and-paste: a genetic process used to form the main body axis was redeployed to make other bodily structures." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| genome | Ten percent of our genome is made up of ancient viruses, and at least another 60 percent consists of repeated elements made by jumping genes gone wild." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| immune system | "…the incredible arsenal that lives within us…" "…the creepy critters that like to call us home … our immune system tries to show them the door." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| immune system | "Thus all my innate defences would essentially hold the fort, and in many instances this first line would be enough to wipe out the invader before the adaptive system gets a chance to craft bespoke weaponry." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| immune system | "Despite their diminutive size, the immune system is eminently capable of spotting these tiny sneaks [e.g., E. coli], since inside each of us is a surveillance network that would make the NSA green with envy." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| immune system | "While the lung escorts invaders out in an orderly fashion, the gut takes a more medieval approach to border control: acid." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| immunotherapy | "Alas, haute couture immunotherapy, like its clothing counterpart, does not come cheap." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| infection | "The classical pathway is tripped when C1 [complement protein 1] is activated by coming into contact with bacteria or by the smoke signals of infection, such as DNA escaping from dying cells." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| infection | "…to minimise the movement of air in the room to reduce the risk of microbes parachuting from the air to land on [a vulnerable person]" | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| infectious disease | "A sudden outbreak of disease – West Nile virus say, or cholera or salmonella – appears to us like a breach in a force field, an aberration that we expect some authority will address and stamp out before it comes close to threatening our families." | Thomas Goetz. (2013). The Remedy. Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the quest to cure tuberculosis. |
| interleukins | [IL-1 alpha and beta are] "pro-inflammatory little fire-starters that travel in the blood to the base of the brain where they reset our internal thermostat, causing the body to reach a feverish temperature." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you. [Read about this book] |
| intersetellar dust | "The dust in the ISM [interstellar medium] doesn't look exactly like dust on earth; it is composed of very small particles made of carbon, ice and silicates (compounds containing silicon and oxygen which constitute the largest group of rock-forming minerals). These gas and dust ingredients are literally the seeds of new worlds." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| Kupffer cells | "Once caught, the red blood cell is consumed whole by the Klupffer cell, which sets about dismantling the haemoglobin inside its tasty morsel." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| lanthanides | "Instead, it [element 93] behaved like a group called the rare earth metals or lanthanides – a line of elements beginning at lanthanum that all acted similarly to each other. These elements were so odd they had been considered apart from the rest of the periodic table, isolated on a naughty step just below the main chart" | Kit Chapman, Superheavy. Making and breaking the periodic table |
| LASERs | "The laser is a child of mixed parentage." | Brian Clegg, Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| leukaemia | "The drug, TGN1412, was supposed to jump-start the immune system of leukaemia patients whose disease has decimated a type of white blood cells called T cells." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you. [Read about this book] |
| life on earth | "Once life emerged, the entire planet was a microbial zoo for billions of years." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| light | "A photon begins its life, travels – potentially for billions of years – and then is destroyed. Each end of its existence, birth and death, involves an interaction with matter. It's the electrical charge of the electron that creates the photon in the first place, kicking off the elegant dance between electrical and magnetic components that Maxwell first described. And it's another electron's electrical field that wipes it out at the end. Q.E.D. [Quantum Electrodynamics] completes the life cycle of light…it's thanks to a charged particle like an electron that a photon of light begins or ends its life." | Brian Clegg, Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| light | "The intention is to pull photons into spinning vortices in a Bose-Einstein condensate, hoping that the light will be dragged into the churning matter like a car sucked into a tornado. If these frigid whirlpools can be spun fast enough, they will become microscopic optical black holes, clawing in light and never letting go until the vortex loses its momentum." | Brian Clegg, Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| light | "…Hau's first experiments used one laser to form a sort of ladder through the otherwise opaque Bose-Einstein condensate that allowed a second ladder to claw its way through. But if that first laser, called the coupling laser, is gradually decreased in power, the team found the second beam was swallowed up in the material." | Brian Clegg, Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| lobotomy | "Moniz, who would win a Nobel prize for his invention of lobotomy, went through the halls of Lisbon's insane asylums looking for patients suitable for the frontal-lobe surgery, which Moniz's surgical colleagues performed, first via ether [sic] injections, with the alcohol essentially burning away the brain, and later with a leucotome, a device shaped like an ice pick, with a retractible wire to whisk out grey matter." | Lauren Slater, The Drugs that Changed our Minds |
| lymphatic system | "The traditional burglar alarm of the body, the lymphatic system…This superhighway for white blood cells involves an elaborate network of vessels, nodes and organs, which circulate a clear liquid called lymph…" | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| macrophages | "Macrophages then arrive to mop up the bodies of the dead and dying cells…These bruise-painting macrophages arrive in the tissue thanks to the same siren call of inflammation and infection that beckoned the neutrophils." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| mass spectometers | "Ptolemy is a 5kg (11lb), shoe-box sized, miniature version of a mass spectrometer housed in a laboratory at The Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. The full-size, Earth-based instrument is easily the size of a car garage. Like its larger Earth-based brother, Ptolemy was designed to measure the so-called light elements, such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, but on the surface of a comet rather than in a perfectly climate-controlled laboratory." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| medical diagnoses | "…'diagnostic drift'… refers to a particular diagnosis coming untethered from its initial conceptual moorings, so that a category of illness once tightly tied to very specific behaviours is suddenly relevant to everyone and his aunt, with the result that the disorder in questions …becomes so watered down, so deeply diluted, that it almost ceases to have any medical meaning at all." | Lauren Slater, The Drugs that Changed our Minds |
| memory drugs | "…memories having clearly been wiped out by ZIP [zeta inhibitory peptide], like some sort of cleanser for the brain. … ZIP completely nuked the memory, and did so selectively." | Lauren Slater, The Drugs that Changed our Mind |
| memory formation | "…cells were speaking to one another in the act of making memories, reaching out to one another across gaps between neurons to form the bridges that allow memory to exist, with one association cemented to another…" | Lauren Slater, The Drugs that Changed our Minds. The history of psychiatry in ten treatments |
| meteorites | "After all, meteorites are the offspring of asteroids and comets, and they have journeyed from being objects in space to landing on Earth." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| microbiome | "The role of diet in shaping the microbiome starts early, with breast milk triggering the first seismic shift in the composition of our gut bacteria." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects [Read about this book] |
| microbiome | "By providing an all-you-can-eat oligosaccharide buffet for B. infantis [Bifidobacterium infantis], the breast milk encourages the bacteria to proliferate rapidly and spread like a benign blanket across the surface of the gut, leaving little room for other [,] potentially harmfu [,] bacteria to grow. " | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects [Read about this book] |
| microbiome | "It seems that the bacteria release chemicals that help shore up the intestinal defences by reinforcing the tight junctions which link the gut cells together. By aiding in the repair and maintenance of these linking points in our gut's security fence, our little caretakers help to protect the integrity of the gut as a physical barrier." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects [Read about this book] |
| modifying light speed | "For the moment, such experiments remain solely in the domain of the laboratory. The effect is to tweak at time's skirts without doing anything to upset the fundamental workings of the Universe." | Brian Clegg, Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| Moon | "The vastness of space means that we've had to be clever about the space destinations we've visited, initially choosing those nearest to us. Humans themselves have literally [sic] only touched the surface of Earth's fellow space citizen, the Moon." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the Solar System |
| near Earth objects | "There are various other, apparently gentle and slow, techniques that could act to nudge an object out of our way: these include, but are not limited to, foil wrapping or spray-painting, ion-beam shepherding, deploying a swarm of reflective mirror bees or laser ablation." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the Solar System |
| nerves | "In 1886, in the process of researching a cure for malaria, against which the dye [methylene blue] did prove to be effective, German scientists and eventual Nobel laureate Paul Ehrlich discovered that this strange and potent blue liquid would selectively stain the nerve cells of the frogs he dissected, and thus seemed to have an affinity for nerves, the motorways and byways of everything we feel and are." | Lauren Slater, The Drugs that Changed our Minds. The history of psychiatry in ten treatments |
| neural connectivity | "So it could be that the way antidepressants make up feel better is by helping the brain grow a richer, thicker forest of connections, which enable us to think faster and with more acuity. This line of reasoning stands in absolute contrast to what Whitaker and Glenmullen have found in their analysis of many outcome studies which all seem to show antidepressants burning the brain" | Lauren Slater, The Drugs that Changed our Minds. |
| neutron | "The neutron was literally [sic] a makeweight to allow nuclei to have more mass than their electric charge would seem to indicate." | Lindley, David – The Dream Universe. How fundamental physics lost its way |
| neutrinos | "…neutrinos…are ghostly particles with very little mass…" | Jeremy Bernstein. Oppenheimer. Portrait of an enigma |
| neutrophils | "…this cell can capture bubonic plague in a web of its own DNA, spew out enzymes to digest anthrax and die in a kamikaze blaze of microbe-massacring glory. …The neutrophil is a key soldier in an eternal war between our bodies and the legions of bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites that surround us." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you |
| neutrophils | "…the neutrophil. It defines cool. It's the James dean of the immune system; it lives fast, dies young and looks good in sunglasses." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| neutrophils | "Initially it was seen as a simple soldier with a basic skills set of 'see bacteria, eat bacteria' but your understanding of the role of the neutrophil has evolved over time. Now we know it is a crafty assassin with a murderous array of killing techniques. | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| neutrophils | "…they observed the post-NET neutrophils crawling through the infected tissue rapidly…" | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| neutrophils | "So it's possible the neutrophils of the young and the healthy in 1918 were too vigorous, and that their friendly fire contributed to the death of the victim." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| NK cells | "Ever neat assassins, NK cells…" | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| nuclear fission | "Because of the odd, nonspherical shapes involved, the critical masses had eventually to be determined experimentally. This was done by adding prices to the assembly until it finally went critical – something that the physicist Richard Feynman called 'tickling the dragon's tail." | Jeremy Bernstein. Oppenheimer. Portrait of an enigma |
| nuclear fission | "Creating an element was walking a tightrope: you needed energy to push past the Coulomb barrier in the first place, but if you used too much energy the nucleus would literally shake itself apart." [I am not considering this an analogy as I cannot see how the energy maps onto tightrope walking.] | Kit Chapman, Superheavy. Making and breaking the periodic table |
| nuclear weapons | "It is the reaction momentum from the stream of ablated material that implodes the secondary bomb. The implosion causes the cylindrical rod of plutonium – the 'spark plug' – to go critical." | Jeremy Bernstein. Oppenheimer. Portrait of an enigma |
| optical computing | "By weaving a basket of light inside a computer, the space taken up by the electronics can be significantly reduced." | Brian Clegg – Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| organ donation | "Organs from prisoners come with a higher risk of blood-borne viruses like hepatitis C and HIV. Which is why some people willing to buy an organ with questionable provenance decide to request a free-range one." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you. [Read about this book] |
| organisms | "Bodies and cells rely on highly controlled behaviors of their constituent parts. But beneath that order lies cacophony." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| osteoblasts | "…the builders in this relationship." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| osteoclasts | "…the bone-inhabiting giant-cell called the osteoclast, whose role is the constant gardener of our bones…the bony equivalent of yin and yang: osteoclasts and osteoblasts." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| pancreas | "The pancreas is a floppy, feather-shaped organ that nestles behind your stomach and acts as the commander-in-chief when its comes to controlling blood sugar levels." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| panspermia | "The divorce between bodily disease and comets seemed final and absolute – until Hoyle and Wickramasinghe offered to set medicine back a few centuries by remarrying them." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| panspermia | "They [Hoyle and Wickramasinghe] would have us believe that a billion comets out beyond Neptune contain viruses capable of invading humans and commandeering their cells to reproduce the cometary genes and clothe them in neat protein jackets, as worn this season in the Ooo Cloud." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| parasites | "Dracunculus medinensis is one of the turduckens of the parasite word – it's a parasite inside a water flea inside a person." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| particle accelerators | "Inside, the Rad Lab was a chaotic mess, full of cages of mice for biomedical experiments, blackboards chalked with equations and giant magnets for the 'proton merry-go-round' that was the Berkeley particle accelerator." | Kit Chapman, Superheavy. Making and breaking the periodic table |
| particle accelerators | "The Berkeley accelerator was loaded with bismuth foil (lead's neighbour on the periodic table – bismuth only has one stable isotope, so it's easier to separate), which was soon pelted with carbon and neon ions. The beams chipped off protons and neutrons, leaving scattered fragments of gold dust. Seaborg had become the modern King Midas." | Kit Chapman, Superheavy. Making and breaking the periodic table |
| phylogeny | "The ancestor of all vertebrates came about by stopping sea squirt development early, freezing the traits of the larval stage, and letting the creature grow to adulthood with them." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| placenta | "it coordinates a cacophony of immunological chatter…" | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| polarisation of light | "Certain crystals would select out light that was polarised in a certain direction. This was because the electrical part of the light wave fights against the electrical components of the atoms in the material." | Brian Clegg, Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| pregnancy | "…a complex collaboration between the placenta (which is made of baby's cells) and the maternal immune system…a majestic dance of immune cells and messengers, carefully choreographed to ensure mum and baby live and grow in (relative) harmony together." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| protein isolation | "The process begins with chemically macerating the issue – in this case, brains – into fluids, then treating them successively to isolate the desired protein form all the others present. The protein soup is run through a series of tubes with each pulling out different contaminants. In one of the final steps the fluid is run through a glass column packed with a special gel. The gel removes the final contaminants and other proteins, and the fluid that makes it through contains only the purified protein." | Neil Shubin, Some Assembly Required. Decoding four billion years of life, from ancient fossils to DNA |
| proton pumps | "They take potassium ions out of the stomach juice and drop them off inside the parietal cell. In a neat little dance of exchange they also pick up hydrogen ions from inside the parietal cell and release them into the maelstrom of the stomach." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| Prozac | "In the US mass-marketing campaign that accompanied fluoxetine's eventual release, Lilly touted the supposed specificity of its drug, likening it to a magic bullet, or a Scud missile that lands with programmed precision on millimetres of neural tissue." | Lauren Slater, The Drugs that Changed our Minds. |
| psychiatric medicines | "Lithium, therefore, was the first 'magic bullet', a site-specific drug, or at least a symptom-specific drug… unlike the 'dirty' drugs that had preceded [the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors]. Lithium, it could be argued was psychiatry's first clean drug, modifying a discrete set of symptoms without spread or stain." "The antidepressants that preceded fluoxetine came to be considered 'dirty drugs' because they worked on multiple neurotransmitter systems at once and therefore caused a host of unpleasant somatic side effects." | Lauren Slater, The Drugs that Changed our Minds. |
| psychiatric medicines | "…because tricyclics work only on depressed subjects and relieve only depression, they may be a superior torchlight into the mechanisms of pathological despair." | Lauren Slater, The Drugs that Changed our Minds. |
| red blood cells | "The Kupffer cells hang around like spiders on the walls of the blood vessels waiting to catch any red blood cells which have passed their best before date (typically 120 days). | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| respiratory system | "…your airways are exceedingly well booby-trapped passages lined with goblet cells, which secrete a fine later of mucus to trap dirt and bacteria." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| Rorschach [ink-blots] test | "The test in America was a lightning rod from the start." | Damion Searls, The Inkblots. Hermann Rorschach, his iconic test & the power of seeing |
| science | "The ideas of early scientists often seem crass because science is a garden where theories grow in a bed of facts, and errors are eventually weeded out; we have acres of facts that were quite uncultivated three hundred years ago, and, as a result, any third class graduate of the twentieth century knows far more about the workings of nature that, say, Isaac Newton did." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| scientific instruments | "By looking into the far distance, telescopes act as time machines that peer back towards the origins of time. Their place in the scientific armoury remains as important now as it was in the 1600s." | Brian Clegg, Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| S.E.T.I. | "The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Soviet Academy of Sciences run projects in support of [the idea of "alien folk…conversing with one another by radio and looking out for primitive newcomers like ourselves"], and spacecraft now leaving the Solar System now carry messages in bottles." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| sex addiction | "These ['sex addicts'] are largely married men who nevertheless seek out prostitutes and pornography, not once a day, not twice a day, but twenty or thirty times in a twenty-four-hour period, men haunted and ravaged by their own internal fires, men eaten alive by uncontrollable desire, men whose brains are likely damp with dopamine coursing down dendrites and being sucked up by axons in a never-ending obsessive circuit." | Lauren Slater, The Drugs that Changed our Minds. The history of psychiatry in ten treatments. |
| sine waves | "Every scientist knows what a sine wave looks like, that graceful, endless up and down. It is intuitive becase it is so familiar, it is a known quantity, a valued friend…. …If you were in a line of work where Bessel functions cropped up regularly, they would become your friends, as familiar to you as sine waves. | Lindley, David – The Dream Universe. How fundamental physics lost its way |
| Solar System | "After the planets were essentially complete the work of purifying the Solar System took hundred of millions of years." | Nigel Calder The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley |
| Solar System | "After all, these celestial bodies [planets, comets and asteroids] are simply made of rock, ice and gases; they contain virtually the same mix of elements and rock minerals we find here on Earth, having been born from the same cloud of dust and gas in interstellar space." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| Solar System | "The size of the Solar System, and the problems in visiting its farthest corners, mean that scientists are still drawing a detailed picture of what the real estate surrounding our average star contains, and trying to understand how it formed." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| Solar System | "Once scientists worked out that the Solar System experienced a major phase of carnage after the planets had formed , they needed to find a way to account for this violent time." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| Solar System | "Despite this seemingly huge distance, it isn't actually very far in the great cosmic billiard table of the inner Solar System so…" | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| Solar System | "In the book of our Solar System, we're barely halfway through, and humans have made but a fleeting appearance on just a few of its pages." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| space exploration | "Rosetta entered deep-space hibernation from June 2011 to January 2014, just keeping enough systems running to stop it from completely freezing to death. The next big hurdle for Rosetta was reactivation from hibernation – for it to be awoken from its deep-space slumber – something that couldn't be guaranteed. Luckily, Rosetta's internal alarm clock, which had been ticking since launch all those years earlier, went off at 10 a.m. GMT on 20 January 2014. This triggered a complex series of events to being the spacecraft out of hibernation, which it managed successfully, waking from its coma without the loss of any system. This was lucky because the Rosetta teams had no way to ruffle the spacecraft's covers from Earth. With the alarm clock having gone off, Rosetta activated its core systems such as heaters and avionics, to slowly bring the whole of the spacecraft back to life." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| space exploration | The little lander could be forever sat on the side of the comet, wedged in a little shadowy crack, but it was to remain in deep-space slumber. However, the orbiter was still alive and tracking [comet] 67P/C-G through space." "As we know, the Rosetta spacecraft had to enter hibernation for many months to save power on its ay to catching comet 67P/C-G. The communication-delay time during this mission was up to 30 minutes each way, depending on the distance from Earth, which was fine in the circumstances because the Rosetta teams didn't need to communicate with their sleeping beauty at this stage." | Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system |
| stars | "Cold fusion was so antithetical to established science that accepting it as true would have meant that astrophysicists could no longer believe in their understanding of the birth, life, and death of stars." | David Lindley – The Dream Universe. How fundamental physics lost its way |
| stimulated emission of radiation | "Generated in a sealed container, those photons could themselves stimulate further photons, a pyramid selling approach to producing light." | Brian Clegg, Light Years. The extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light. |
| subatomic particles | "New subatomic particles arrived on the scene, singly at first but later in battalions. These newcomers had both experimental and theoretical origins, In 1930, the same year that Dirac predicted the antielectron, Wolfgang Pauli came up with another prediction, but for empirical reasons. In radioactive beta decays, the particles that leaving the scene of the crime have less total energy than the particles that went in, and Pauli suggested that the missing energy was carried away by neutral and elusive particles that was also produced in the decay." | Lindley, David – The Dream Universe. How fundamental physics lost its way |
| 'superheavy' elements | "The superheavy elements – the final 15, element 104 and beyond – have only ever existed in quantities so small they can't be seen by the human eye and can last for less than a second. … They are chemistry's unicorns." "You can't hold a superheavy element in your hand. Chances are, as you read this, many of these elements do not exist anywhere in the universe. They are chemical unicorns. But they are unicorns we know exist." [Seemingly they exist in a sense that does not require them to exist anywhere in the universe] | Kit Chapman, Superheavy. Making and breaking the periodic table |
| T cells | "Normally T cells need two separate on-switches to be flicked at the same time to activate their invader-destroying skills." | Catherine Carver. Immune. How your body defends and protects you. [Read about this book] |
| T cells and B cells | "…our adaptive assassins, our T and B cells" | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| Toxoplasma gondii | "By using this mouse-shaped Trojan horse the parasite gets itself delivered directly into the cat's gut…" | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| tears | "Yet the tears we shed aren't just cathartic, they're also a form of chemical warfare." | Catherine Carver, Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| tears | "…tear lipocalin, whose neat structure includes a pocket for binding a multitude of molecules. This clever pocket allows tear lipocalin to bind the bacterial siderophores…neutralising the bacterium's ability to steal iron from us…" | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| transplantation | "David's transplant was doomed to fail. Katherine's bone marrow was a Trojan horse, harbouring a hidden danger: the Epstein-Barr virus…" | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| viruses | "…viruses are the squatters of pathogen society. Unlike bacteria, which tend to carry their own internal baggage for all their disease-making needs, viruses pack light." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| viruses | "…modifying human cells to act like virus-mules to ferry the virus through the blood to the tumour…" | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
| viruses | "…while many drugs are one-attack-method-wonders, the [oncolytic] viruses have a Swiss army knife selection of killer techniques at their disposal." | Catherine Carver Immune. How your body defends and protects you [Read about this book] |
Black holes have to lose their 'hair'
Cells are cities buzzing with activity
Cells are fantastical living machines
Cells of the innate immune system are the first responder cells
Corners of our genome that are 'on steriods'
Dutch physicist H.A. Lorentz was Einstein's John the Baptist
Fossil turbulence and fossil galaxy groups
Lodestones (magnetic stones) feed on iron
Matter is fed into black holes
T cells are door to door wanderers that can detect even the whiff of an invader
The brain's ability to naturally produce dopamine gets fried
Was the stellar burp really a sneeze? Pulling back the veil on an astronomical metaphor
From this website
In the kind of research known as case study, we examine cases that may be considered to (metaphorically) be organisms in the way the case is entangled within a context.
Note on analogies, similes and metaphors.
In practice the precise demarcations between similes, metaphors (and anthropomorphisms) and analogies may not be absolutely clear. I have tried to follow the rule that if a comparison is set out to make a structural mapping clear (even if this is not spelt out as a mapping: e.g., an atom with its electrons is like a sun with its planets) this counts as an analogy. Where I do not think a comparison is an analogy, but the comparison is made explicit ("…as if…", "…like…": e.g., the atom, like a tiny solar system) I consider this a simile. When the audience is left to spot a comparison (rather than a literal identity) is being made (e.g., the oxygen atom, this tiny solar system) I class this a metaphor.
Anthropomorphism may be seen as a particular kind of metaphor where a metaphorical feature implies a non-human entity has human attributes (e.g., meteors can be impetuous).
I reserve the right to reassign some of these comparisons in due course!
