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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.

world picture of physics contains ether waves

An example of a scientific concept that would today be considered an alternative conception

"It is absolutely untrue, although it is often asserted, that the world picture of physics contains, or may contain, directly observable magnitudes only. On the contrary, directly observable magnitudes are not found at all in the world picture. It contain symbols only. In fact, the world picture even contains constituents which have only a very indirect significance for the sense world, or no significance at all, such as ether waves, partial vibrations, frames of reference, etc".
Planck, M. (1948/1949). The concept of causality in physics (F. Gaynor, Trans.). In Scientific Autobiography and other papers (pp. 121-150). Philosophical Library.

Read about ideas of the ether

many great physicists studied the mechanical properties of the luminiferous ether

An example of a historical scientific idea that today would be considered an alternative conception,

"There are also many phantom problems which are indubitably doomed to remain such forever. One of these, for instance, is the problem which used to keep many a great physicist busy for many years: The study of the mechanical properties of the luminiferous ether. The meaninglessness of this problem follows from its basic premise, which postulates that light vibrations are of a mechanical nature. This premise is erroneous, and must remain so forever."
Plank, M. (1947/1949). Phantom problems in science (F. Gaynor, Trans.). In Scientific Autobiography and other papers (pp. 52-79). Philosophical Library.

Clerk Maxwell considered the ether to be a reality

An example of an historical scientific conception:

"…hypotheses may be of great value in science if they suggest new connections between facts, which lead to further experiments, even though these experiments ultimately show them to be untenable. The hypothesis of the ether, a medium filling the whole of space, is an example which illustrates this point. It was invoked to account for certain wave-like properties of light. Then Clerk Maxwell, developing mathematically the ideas of Faraday on electromagnetism, postulated a medium for the transition of electromagnetic effects. As he said, it was 'not philosophical' to invent a new medium, and when he succeeded in showing that disturbances in the electromagnetic medium would have a velocity equal to that of light in the luminiferous ether, he held it to be a strong reason for believing light to be an electromagnetic phenomenon, and the ether to be a 'reality'. The electromagnetic theory of light is one of the most fertile in physics, but the hypothesis of the ether has been discarded.

…in accounting for the radiation of heat across a vacuum such as occurs when the Sun warms the Earth, we might invoke an invisible medium, and call it the ether, and consider that radiant heat consisted of waves travelling through it. Such an ether would be an example of an all-pervading hypothetical body, and the waves would be hypothetical motions of its parts. Theories of this type have often proved of great value in science, especially when they can be developed mathematically so that deductions made from them can be tested accurately by means of measurements."

Brown, G. Burniston (1950) Science. Its method and its philosophy. London. George Allen & Unwin Ltd.

The luminiferous ether was a substance conjectured to fill space, which acted as the medium through which radiation such as light passed. As light was considered a kind of wave motion it was assumed to need some kind of medium that it could cause to oscillate. As light travelled through space from the distant stars, space had to be filled with ether. Although now rejected, the idea was once taken very seriously by scientists.

The term drew on the ancient belief that the heavens were constructed from a quintessence, that is, a fifth element other than the four then considered to be the components of all materials on Earth (air, earth, fire and water), and known as ether or æther (aether).

The ether was assumed to be a very subtle fluid (as it did not impede the planets in their orbits) and the same name was also given to a volatile chemical compound (so there is a genuine substance called ether, although the luminiferous ether is no longer accepted).

Michelson experiment effected physics like the blast of Joshua's trumpet on the walls of Jericho

An example of an analogy used in explaining science:

"The first impact against the very foundations of the beautiful and, apparently eternal, castle of classical physics, an impact that shook practically every single stone of this elaborate building and sent its walls tumbling down, like the walls of Jericho before the blast of Joshua's trumpet, was delivered by what would seem to be an unpretentious experiment carried out in 1887 by an American physicist, A. A. Michelson. The idea of Michelson's experiment is very simple and is based on a physical picture according to which light represents some kind of wave motion travelling through the so called 'light-carrying ether', a hypothetical substance uniformly filling up interstellar space as well as the intervals between the atoms in all material bodies."

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

The idea of a light-carrying ether was widely accepted by scientists at one time.

comet tails contain levitating material

Examples of historical scientific ideas (no longer considered):

"One idea on offer in the seventeenth century was that comets were a matter of levity: the tail was said to be a stream of levitating material subject to a supposed force of anti-gravity that repelled it from the Sun. Or the comet allegedly stirred up the aether in cosmic space like a ship ploughing through the sea."

Nigel Calder (1980) The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley. British Broadcasting Corporation

These days the term 'levity' is used metaphorically, but once it was meant more literally as a kind of opposite of weight.

Read about the aether

The reference to a ship is an analogy that is based on the alternative (historical) conception that space is filled with aether.

planets are made from ether

An example of an historical scientific conception:

"…Johann Helvius in 1668 reasoned that planets were made from perfect aether, but had to spin to be everlasting, otherwise the heat of the Sun would damage them."

Nigel Calder (1980) The Comet is Coming! The feverish legacy of Mr Halley. BBC

atoms are vortexes in the ether

An example of an historical scientific conception, now rejected:

"The theory in question was the vortex model of the atom, due in part to Lord Kelvin and prompted by his seeing some clever experiments on the properties of smoke rings, in which they vibrated and gently bounced off one another. Kelvin proposed that atoms were similar formations in the ether, the hypothetical medium that was supposed at the time to carry light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation."
Lindley, David (2020): The Dream Universe. How fundamental physics lost its way. Doubleday.

light travels as impulses between particles in the ether

An example of an historical alternative conception, and the use of analogy by a scientist:

"The great strength of the Huygens principle (as it came to be known) was that all the laws of optics could now be explained by geometry. Simple lines on paper offered vivid and persuasive representations of phenomena that had seemed baffling in physical reality.
Lines were mathematical ideals. What was the physical reality? Huygens was not prepared to let go of the Cartesian idea of some from of matter in motion – not cannonballs perhaps, but fine particles of some kind dispersed through an ether, through which light travels as impulses received by one particle and then transmitted in all directions to further particles. He sought to develop the analogy … between light and sound waves, which are transmitted longitudinally by the compression and expansion of the air, but he was unable to do so in a way consistent with the mathematics."

Hugh Aldersley-Williams (2020) Dutch Light. Christiaan Huygens and the making of science in Europe. Picador.

This quote shows that analogies are actually used by scientists in the process of scientific discovery (a plausible analogy suggests a hypothesis to be explored and tested) – here that light might be a longitudinal wave like sound.

The idea that light transmission depended upon a medium, the æther or luminiferous ether (it had to be transmitted through something in space; if light is a wave, some medium must oscillate) was a widely accepted idea for centuries.