Comparisons – Page 24 – Science-Education-Research

ladder of nature became an elevator

An example of metaphor used in writing about science:

"In the eighteenth century, evolutionary theories built on the progressive narrative of the German Idealists. Reimagining the Neopolatonic hierarchy as a movement from simple to complex, biologists began to make sense of evidence that species have changed through time (e.g., fossils). The scala naturae, or ladder of nature, became an elevator."

Lucas John Mix (2018) Life Concepts from Aristotle to Darwin. On vegetable souls. Cham, Switzerland: palgrave macmillan.

As the ladder of nature (also known as the great chain of being) was already a metaphor, this might be seen as an extended metaphor.

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Many examples of science metaphors are listed in 'Creative comparisons: Making science familiar through language. An illustrative catalogue of figurative comparisons and analogies for science concepts'. Free Download.

clock acts as an organism as long as it runs properly

An example of an historical analogy used to explain a scientific idea:

"While Leibniz had associated life with sensation and appetite, Stahl [Georg Ernst Stahl] associated it with a capacity to resit decay…He argued for vegetable souls using a mechanical clock metaphor to contrast machines and organisms. The clock has been designed by a human. It acts as an organism by fulfilling its purpose: to tell the time accurately. As an extension of its designer, it is both organic and instrumental. When the clock breaks, it continues to follow the laws of physical necessity, but it is no longer instrumental. It becomes simple mechanical. The human provides the clock with formal, efficient, and final causes, making it organic, but only when it runs properly. An organism, occurs when the formal, efficient, and final causes exist within the clock: when it defines, creates, directs and copies itself."

Lucas John Mix (2018) Life Concepts from Aristotle to Darwin. On vegetable souls. Cham, Switzerland: plagrave macmillan.

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Many examples of science analogies are listed in 'Creative comparisons: Making science familiar through language. An illustrative catalogue of figurative comparisons and analogies for science concepts'. Free Download.

final causes are like virgins consecrated to God

An example of an analogy used to explain an idea in science:

"[Francis] Bacon called efficient causes the vehicles of final causes. The two never conflict…One always acts thorough the other, making knowledge of efficient causes more useful. In the 1623 revision of Advancement ['Of Proficience and Advancement of Learning Divine and Human'], he compared final causes to virgins, who are consecrated to God. Bacon likely intended this to mean they were of utmost worth (as abstract knowledge) but never bear fruit (as practical knowledge). Later biologists, notably Darwin and T. H. Huxley, however, spoke of final causes as 'barren virgins' in order to dismiss them as pointless."

Lucas John Mix (2018) Life Concepts from Aristotle to Darwin. On vegetable souls. Cham, Switzerland: plagrave macmillan.

It seems that Bacon and later biologists were using metaphor, but in this account the comparison is mapped out as an analogy.

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animals as automata are like thermostats

An example of an analogy used to explain an historic scientific conception:

"With no back-end operator, animals have very limited function. Like a thermostat, they can sense but cannot prefer one sensation over another. They have neither pain nor pleasure. The animal receives an objective signal input and responds automatically, without a subjective experience of being helped or harmed."

Lucas John Mix (2018) Life Concepts from Aristotle to Darwin. On vegetable souls. Cham, Switzerland: plagrave macmillan.

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The notion being described, due to Descartes and other natural philosophers, saw animals as lacking essential human attributes (that we no longer consider as limited to humans) and being like mechanical automata.

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ideal universe matches ideal kingdom

An example of an historical analogy between society and nature,

"The High Middle Ages and Renaissance (roughly 1000-1500) embraced the scala naturae, linking all reality in a harmonious pyramid pointed upward toward God. The ideal universe matched the ideal kingdom, with a single ruler, a few courtiers, and many subjects, perfectly ordered and arranged."

Lucas John Mix (2018) Life Concepts from Aristotle to Darwin. On vegetable souls. Cham, Switzerland: plagrave macmillan.

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The scala naturae (ladder of nature, or great chain of being) was a historical conception of the relationships between components of 'the creation'.

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Historical examples of alternative conceptions

soul of an organism resembles the movement of a clock

An example of an analogy to explain an historical scientific concept,

"…classicists have suggested that souls [as the term was used by Aristotle] are processes. In this model, the soul resembles the movement of a grandfather clock. It can only be said to run properly if it ticks away the seconds at a constant rate. It must be wound (i.e., energy must be added to make the pendulum swing) but the constant motion defines it, not the rare ringing of the bell."

Lucas John Mix (2018) Life Concepts from Aristotle to Darwin. On vegetable souls. Cham, Switzerland: plagrave macmillan.

The notion of 'soul' in the modern world has supernatural associations, but Aristotle's notion of the soul (which was not immortal, but was destroyed at the death of the individual organism) can be understood in terms of the complexity and organisation – a kind of organising principle – within organisms.

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multicellular and acellular slime moulds are like bubbles that clump together or join into one big bubble

An example of analogy used to explain a scientific idea

"Cellular slime moulds spend much of their life living as single-celled organisms, and when times get tough, food gets scarce, they come together to form a multicellular structure, but the individual cells retain their identity as an individual cell. So it is a little bit like, imagine you are playing with bubbles as a child, those bubbles can sometimes stick together, but they remain, you can see the different bubbles, in a kind of clump of bubbles. Now the acellular ones, when they come together, because they also come together from a single-celled state into a kind of merged state, when they come together they form one giant cell, so it is a bit like those bubbles have joined to form one big bubble with one outer membrane. So it's got quite a different way of leaving a single celled state and coming into a merged state."

Dr Merlin Sheldrake (Oxford University and the Vrije University Amsterdam) was talking on an episode ('Slime Moulds') of 'In Our Time'

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star was lying hidden between the horns of the moon

An example of metaphor in scientific writing:

"…we saw the star [Hyades] brought into contact with the shadowy part of the lunar body and already lying hidden between the horns of the moon at the end of the fifth hour of the night, though the star was nearer the southern horn by three quarters as it were of the width or diameter of the moon."

Nicolaus Copernicus (1543/1995) On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (Translator: Charles Glenn Wallis) Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books

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orbital circle of moon has four hinges

An example of simile in scientific writing:

"Moreover, the orbital circle of the moon with its four 'hinges' or cardinal points revolves obliquely around the centre of the Earth in a regular movement of approximately 3' per day, and it completes is revolution in 19 years."

Nicolaus Copernicus (1543/1995) On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (Translator: Charles Glenn Wallis) Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books

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Many examples of science similes are listed in 'Creative Comparisons: Making Science Familiar through Language. An illustrative catalogue of figurative comparisons and analogies for science concepts'. Free Download.

The reference to 19 years refers to the 19-year 'Metonic' cycle, the time it takes (approximately) for the moon's phases to repeat in terms of the days of the earthly calendar.

librations cause the poles to describe paths similar to a twisted garland

An example of simile in scientific writing:

"For this reason you should understand two reciprocal movements belonging wholly to the poles, like hanging balances, since the poles and circles in a sphere imply one another mutually and are in agreement. Therefore there will be one movement which changes the inclination of those circles [66˚] by moving the poles up and down in proportion to the angle of section. There is another which alternately increases and decreases the solstitial and equinoctial precessions by a movement taking places crosswise. Now we call these movements 'librations', or 'swinging movements' because like hanging bodies swinging over the same course between two limits they become faster in the middle and very slow at the extremes.

…And so these two librations competing with one another make the poles of the earth in the passage of time describe certain lines similar to a twisted garland."
pp.124-125

Nicolaus Copernicus (1543/1995) On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (Translator: Charles Glenn Wallis) Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books

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As well as the twisted garland simile, there is arguably here an analogy in how aspects of the movement of the beam of a beam balance (or a simple pendulum) can be mapped onto the movements of the planet, such that the term libration is used metaphorically by analogy. (Perhaps a torsional pendulum would make a better analogy?) The term is also now used in relation to some modes of oscillation in molecules.

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sun is a lantern which is the lamp of a very beautiful temple

An example of the use of metaphor and simile in scientific writing:

"In the centre of all rests the sun. For who would place this lamp of a very beautiful temple in another or better place than this wherefrom it can illuminate everything at the same time? As a matter of fact, not unhappily do some call it the lantern, others, the mind and still others, the pilot of the world. Trismegistus calls it a 'visible god'; Sophocles' Electra, 'that which gazes upon all things'. And so the sun, as if resting on a kingly throne, governs the family of stars which wheel around."

Nicolaus Copernicus (1543/1995) On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (Translator: Charles Glenn Wallis) Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books

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distance of earth from the centre of the cosmos is as a few atoms of a visible body

An example of an analogy used in scientific argument,

"…since the minimal and indivisible corpuscles, which are called atoms, are not perceptible to sense, they do not, when taken in twos or in some small number, constitute a visible body; but they can be taken in such a large quantity that there will at last be enough to form a visible magnitude. So it is as regards the place of the earth; for although it is not at the centre of the world, nevertheless the distance is as nothing, particularly in comparison with the sphere of the fixed stars."

Nicolaus Copernicus (1543/1995) On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (Translator: Charles Glenn Wallis) Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books

Copernicus argued against the widely held traditional idea that the earth was at the very centre of the universe (a notion that no longer has a clear scientific meaning today), suggesting the true centre was near the sun (around which he claimed the earth moved). However, he tries to suggest that the distance of the earth from the world's centre was so small compared with the scale of the cosmos that it should be treated as in effect 'nothing'.

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