Keith S. Taber
Analogy is a key tool in the teacher's toolbox when 'making the unfamiliar familiar'. Science teachers are often charged with presenting ideas that are abstract and unfamiliar, and sometimes it can help if the teacher can point out how in some ways a seemingly obscure notion is just like something already familiar to the learner. An analogy goes beyond a simile (which simply suggests something is a bit like something else) by offering a sense of how the structure of the 'analogue' maps onto the structure of the 'target'.
Apologies are useful well beyond the classroom. They are used by science journalists reporting on scientific developments, and by authors writing popular science books; and by scientists themselves when explaining their work to the public. But analogies have a more inherent role in science practices: not only being both used in formal scientific accounts written to explain to and persuade other scientists about new ideas, but actually as a tool in scientific discovery as a source of hypotheses.
I have on this site reported a wide range of examples of analogies I have come across for different scientific concepts and phenomena.
Sometimes, however, one comes across an analogy from a scientific concept or phenomenon to something else – rather than the other way round. The logic of using analogies is that the source analogue needs to already be familiar to a reader or listener if it is to help explain something that is novel. So, an analogy between the concept of working memory capacity and fatty acid structure might be used
- to explain something about working memory to a chemist – but could also be used
- to explain fatty acid structure to a psychologist who already knew about working memory.
So, the use of a scientific idea as the source analogue for some other target idea suggests the user assumes the audience is also familiar with the science. Therefore I deduce that Gillian Tett, journalist at the Financial Times presumably is confident that listeners to BBC Radio 4 will be familiar with the concept of chemical reactions.
Some chemical reactions only proceed at a viable rate on heating. However, an ice bath may be needed to cool some very vigorous reactions to limit their rate. (Image © University of Colorado at Boulder, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.)
A cold temperature reaction?
Tett was discussing her experience of the annual World Economic Forum meeting that has just been held in the snow of the Swiss skiing resort of Davos, and suggested that the mixing of various politicians and industry and media and lobbyists had the potential to lead to interesting outcomes – like some kind of chemistry experiment,
"I got jammed into a room with will.i.am, the rapper, who was talking about his views for A.I., and suddenly you've got these activists standing next to somebody from some of the big tech. companies, and a government minister, and a group from Kenya, all talking about whether A.I. could actually be a tool to reduce social inequality, rather than increase it. So, it is a bit like a chemistry experiment where you take all of these ambitious, self-selecting, hustling molecules from around the world, shove them into one test-tube, apply maximum pressure, and force them to collide with each other at close quarters with no sleep, and see what kind of compounds arise."
Gillian Tett talking on the BBC's 'The Week in Westminster'
An experiment (by definition) has uncertain results, and Tett used the analogue of the chemistry experiment to imply that the diverse mixes of people collected together at Davos could lead to unexpected outcomes – just like mixing a diverse range of substances might. Tett saw the way such diverse groups become 'jammed' into rooms in arbitrary combinations as they make their ways around the meeting as akin to increasing the pressure of a reaction mixture of arbitrary reagents. This reflects something of the popular media notion of dangerous 'scientific experiments', as carried out by mad scientists in their basements. Real scientific experiments are carried out in carefully controlled conditions to test specific hypothesis. The outcome is uncertain, but the composition of the reaction mixture is carefully chosen with some specific product(s) in mind.
The figure below represents the mapping between the analogue (a rather undisciplined chemistry experiment) and the reaction conditions experienced by delegates in the melting pot of Davos.
Inspection of my figure suggests some indiscipline in the analogy. The reaction conditions are to "apply maximum pressure, and force [the molecules] to collide with each other at close quarters with no sleep". Now this phrasing seems to shift mid-sentence,
- from the analogue (the chemical experiment:"apply maximum pressure, and force [the molecules] to collide with each other")
- to the target (being jammed into a room at the conference: "at close quarters with no sleep").
One explanation might be that Gillian Tett is not very good at thinking though analogies. Another might be that, as she was being interviewed for the radio, she was composing the analogy off-the-cut without time to reflect and review and revise…
Either of those options could be correct, but I suspect this shift offered some ambiguity that was deliberately introduced rhetorically to increase the impact of the analogy on a listener. Tatt ('an anthropologist by training' and Provost of King's College, Cambridge) had described the molecules anthropomorphically: just as molecules do not sleep,
- they cannot be 'ambitious', as this is a human characteristic;
- they are not sentient agents, so cannot be 'self-selecting'; and
- nor can they 'hustle' as they have no control over their movements.
But the journalists, politicians, activists and industrialists can be described in these terms, reinforcing the mapping between the molecules and the Davos delegates. So, I suspect that whilst this disrupted the strict mapping of the analogy, it reinforced the metaphorical way in which Tett wanted to convey the sense that the ways in which the Davos meeting offered 'experimental' mixing of the reacting groups had the potential to produce novel syntheses.
Read about examples of different science analogies
Read about making the unfamiliar familiar
Read about anthropomorphism in learners' thinking
Read about examples of anthropomorphism in public discussion of science
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