Personification is treating a nonperson as if a person, as when referring to a country or boat as a 'she'. Personification is quite common in science writing. Sometimes this is limited to no more that referring to an 'it' as he (e.g., the Sun) or she (e.g., the Moon), but sometimes anthropomorphic metaphors are used (suggesting the object acts or perceives or feels as a person).
Read about personification in science
In particular, there is a long tradition of referring to nature as as if a female person ('she', 'her', 'herself'), and this page offers access to some of those examples (some historical, but some more contemporary).
Some other examples of personification (of heavenly bodies, of elements, etc.) are abstracted on another page:
Read examples of personification
Scientists and others who have personified nature include:
Claude Gay
Charles Darwin
- for the credit of dame Nature
- Nature changed her plan in order that more seeds might be produced
- Nature sows her broad fields
Francis Bacon
James Hutton
- learn of nature the ways and means which in her wisdom are adopted
- Nature does not erect a continent of land among the clouds to show her power
- nature does not have a burning mountain for an end in her intention
- open the book of Nature and read in her records
James Simpson
Joseph Glanvill
- can we claim to view nature while she lay in her simple originals
- her finer threads are out of the reach of our senses
- nature does not always prostrate her beauties to the naked view
- nature has supposed impossibilities within her sphere of action
- obscuring veil of nature adds to the enravishments of her admirers
- she hath many hidden energies not apparent in her obvious pieces
- to captivate nature and make her subserve our purposes
- we cannot prescribe methods to nature in her actings
Neils Bohr
- nature herself determines values measured
- nature herself has imposed a limit on causal descriptions of phenomena
Nicolaus Copernicus
Other sources:
- secrets of nature are exhorted from her ('Heroes of Invention and Discovery: Lives of eminent inventors and pioneers in science')
