crystallisation – Science-Education-Research

teaching needs to be customised like laboratory techniques

An example of an analogy drawing upon scientific ideas:

"It is also likely that just how a teaching approach is best applied (or indeed sometimes customised to local conditions) will be quite different in diverse teaching and learning contexts. Teaching is not the kind of activity that can sensibly be planned and prescribed centrally – it always needs to respond to the specific curriculum, the specific course, and the specific learners. Perhaps this is not so different from a chemical process like crystallisation or fractional distillation where certain general principles always apply, yet the precise procedures followed will be modified according to the mass of the sample concerned and the specific reagents involved."

Taber, Keith S. (2024) Chemical pedagogy. Instructional approaches and teaching techniques in chemistry. Royal Society of Chemistry. [Download Chapter 1]

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anthropological analysis does not set produce symmetrical crystals of significance purified of the material complexity

An example of the use of science concepts as metaphors:

"…it does make the view of anthropological analysis as the conceptual manipulation of discovered facts, a logical reconstruction of a mere reality, seem rather lame. To set forth symmetrical crystals of significance, purified of the material complexity in which they were located, and then attribute their existence to autogenous principles of order, universal properties of the human mind, or vast, a priori weltsanchauungen [worldviews], is to pretend a science that does not exist and imagine a reality that cannot be found."

Clifford Geertz (2000) Thick description: toward an interpretative theory of culture, in The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays. (2nd Edition)

Geertz uses a scientific metaphor to discuss the nature and limits of anthropology.

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salt molecules are kicked out of supersaturated solution

An example of a simile used in popular science writing:

"If, for example, we drop a small salt crystal into a supersaturated salt solution in water, the crystal will grow by adding to its surface successive layers of salt molecules extracted (or rather 'kicked out') from the water.

…

The molecules of salt that were previously mixed with water molecules simply collect themselves on the surface of the growing crystal."

George Gamow (1961) One, Two, Three…Infinity. Facts and speculations of science, Revised Edition, Dover Publications, Inc., New York.

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Salt is an ionic substance, so does not form molecules under usual conditions. The crystal grows by the addition of ions, not molecules. The solution contains hydrated sodium ions and hydrated chloride ions, not molecules. (Elsewhere in the same book Gamow suggests solid salt contains atoms of sodium and chlorine – a different misconception!)

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