Comparisons – Page 37 – Science-Education-Research

objects are smeared around a black hole event horizon like oil

An example of analogy used in popular science writing:

"…you can think of the the surface of a black hole's event horizon as covered in tiny tiles, each carrying one 'bit' of the information describing the entropy of everything that's fallen inside.
The mathematics shows that the event horizon's area grows the right number of tiles to encode every 'bit' of entropy that falls into the black hole. For a rough visual analogy, imagine a stream of oil pouring onto a sphere, coating it in a very thin layer. As more oil flows, the sphere expands by an amount which ensures that the oil layer remains infinitesimally thin. Similarly, to observers outside a black hole, objects don't appear to fall into it. Rather, they are smeared in a thin layer onto the event horizon."

Paul Sen (2022) Einstein's Fridge. The science of fire, ice and the universe. William Collins.

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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.

[The 'tiles' are only a visualisation device – a visual simile? A metaphor?]

black hole appears to evaporate

An example of a simile employed in popular science writing:

"To an outside observer, it appears as if the back hole is 'evaporating', slowly shrinking as it emits energy – this is what is referred to as 'Hawking radiation'."

Paul Sen (2022) Einstein's Fridge. The science of fire, ice and the universe. William Collins.

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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.

event horizon is a one-way door

An example of metaphor used in popular science writing:

"Let us return to a black hole's event horizon, this strange one-way door out of our region of space, because scientists encountered here the strangest incarnation of the laws of thermodynamics."

Paul Sen (2022) Einstein's Fridge. The science of fire, ice and the universe. William Collins.

Read about metaphor in science

Read about examples of science metaphors

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.

black holes colliding in space are like icebergs colliding in the ocean

An example of analogy in popular science writing:

"Evidence for black holes also comes form the fact that according to the general theory of relativity, when two black holes collide, they coalesce into a single hole and release a great deal of energy in the form of ripples or waves in space. Remember, space behaves like a liquid, so waves can form in it in a way that's analogous to the way waves form in water. If two icebergs collide in the ocean, that causes ripples to spread outwards from the point of the collision through the water. Similarly, when black holes collide, that causes ripples to spread outwards through space."
Paul Sen (2022) Einstein's Fridge. The science of fire, ice and the universe. William Collins.

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black hole sucks in space like a drain hole sucks in water

An example of an analogy (drawing on an alternative conception) in popular science writing:

"In one part of the ocean, a drain hole sucks in all the water around it. At a specific distance form the the drain hole, which is determined by how powerfully it sucks the water, the inward speed of the water flow reaches and then exceeds the speed of sound.
…
So what's the relevance of this drain hole to a black hole? The analogy works, roughly, as follows: The drain sucking water towards it is equivalent to the singularity at the centre of a black hole sucking space towards it. …"

Paul Sen (2022) Einstein's Fridge. The science of fire, ice and the universe. William Collins.

[A drain hole does not actively suck anything in – higher pressure outside the hole leads to a net force that pushes water in. Read about 'sucking'.]

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redundancy in communicating information is like extra layers of clothing

An analogy used in popular science writing:

"We add or subtract redundancy to our messages in response to the amount of interference they need to overcome just as we add of remove layers of clothing in response to the outside temperature."

Paul Sen (2022) Einstein's Fridge. The science of fire, ice and the universe. William Collins.

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thermionic valves are like early steam engines

An example of an analogy in popular science writing:

"Thermionic valves became the mainstay of telephony in the first half of the twentieth century, enabling global communication via cables or wirelessly with the use of radio waves.
There's an analogy here to the early days of steam. Remember how inefficient engines were then, wasting well over 90 per cent of the heat they produced. Not knowing how to improve them, people burned more coal. The thinking behind thermionic valves was similar, for they didn't reduce noise levels so much as raise the strength of signals so they were no longer swamped. In both cases, engineers were pumping more energy into the system to overcome the waste of most of it."

Paul Sen (2022) Einstein's Fridge. The science of fire, ice and the universe. William Collins.

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Brownian motion is like ping-pong balls bumping into a beach ball

An example of analogy (and simile) in popular science writing:

"…picture water at the [sub]microscopic level. Everywhere there are water molecules, which look like tiny spheres. Every now and again you encounter a giant sphere, thousands of times larger than the water molecules. That's a pollen particle. What you also observe is frenetic activity. The water molecules are vibrating and wobbling, bumping into one another like bumper cars. The ones next to the pollen particle collide into it. It's as if tiny ping-pong balls are bumping into a giant beach ball from every possible direction."

Paul Sen (2022) Einstein's Fridge. The science of fire, ice and the universe. William Collins.

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red light is like feathers whereas ultraviolet is like bullets

An example of analogy in popular science writing:

"Einstein explained this as follows: Light consists of lumps of energy, but the amount of energy in each lump depends on the frequency of the light. So, a lump of red light is smaller (i.e., contains less energy) than a lump of blue light. A lump of blue light is smaller than a lump of ultraviolet light. Shining red light on a substance, therefore, is akin to bombarding your face with feathers. If a hundred feathers blew into your face, you could brush them off with little difficulty. Shining ultraviolet on something is equivalent to firing bullets at it. A single bullet will do far more damage than a hundred feathers. In the same way, a few particles of ultraviolet light will generate far more electric current that a large number of red-light particles."

Paul Sen (2022) Einstein's Fridge. The science of fire, ice and the universe. William Collins.

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adenosine triphosphate is like a tiny molecular spring

An example of an analogy used in popular science writing:

"Think of ATP [adenosine triphosphate] as a tiny molecular spring that becomes coiled when it receives free energy. That packet of energy can then be accessed on demand by the chemical equivalent of releasing the spring in the ATP.

… carbohydrate molecules … are also chemical springs."

Paul Sen (2022) Einstein's Fridge. The science of fire, ice and the universe. William Collins.

The reference to carbohydrate molecules being chemical springs is in itself a metaphor, but can be understood in terms of the more developed accounts of ATP.

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hydrogen released by chlorophyll needs to rebond

An example of anthropomorphism in popular science writing:

"Sunlight is an abundant source of free energy. The chlorophyll molecule in the leaves of plants uses this to unburn water – in other words, to split the H₂O molecule into its constituent parts of hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen is released into the atmosphere, leaving hydrogen on its own, within the leaves. Isolated hydrogen, of this kind, is itself now a source of free energy because it needs to rebond with oxygen or anything chemically similar to oxygen."

Paul Sen (2022) Einstein's Fridge. The science of fire, ice and the universe. William Collins.

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

Note: photosynthesis is a complex multi-stage process, and the details are not essential to the author's point here. Hydrogen is not released in photosynthesis and is not clear what is meant here by 'hydrogen on its own' and 'isolated hydrogen', (not the compound hydrogen which is already 'bonded') as free hydrogen atoms are not formed: so presumably H⁺ ions produced when the water molecules are oxidised? The notion that these ions 'needs to rebond' does make sense chemically.

As the process does not reverse the burning of hydrogen to form water, the reference to 'unburning' should be seen as a metaphor.

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second law of thermodynamics is a terroristic nimbus cloud

An example of metaphor in scientific writing

"…Josef Loschmidt…disliked the way the second law of thermodynamics predicted that the universe would eventually die, degenerating into a never-change state in which all heat had dissipated throughout the cosmos. If this were true, wrote Loschmidt, the second law is a 'terroristic nimbus cloud, which appears to be a destructive principle to all life in the universe'."

Paul Sen (2022) Einstein's Fridge. The science of fire, ice and the universe. William Collins.

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