An example of metaphor in scientific writing
"With these advances in understanding has come a much greater armoury of experimental methods. On every level of organization, both of structure and of energy change, new physical and chemical instruments are offering the biologist a range of opportunity unequalled since the first use of the microscope and of the balance in the seventeenth century. On the chemical level the introduction of radioactive tracers …For the determination of molecular structure, the use of spectroscopy, particularly infra-red spectroscopy, and of x-ray crystallography combined…Chemical methods themselves have enormously increased their range and accuracy…Differential chromatography…X-ray analysis can be extended…
…the development of the electron microscope, making visible in an immediately understandable form, structures from those containing a few score atoms to the limits of microscopic vision and beyond. We are certainly now in a Galilean phase of observational biology.
…the new phase microscopes, and the ultra-violet, infra-red, polarizing and reflecting microscopes provide an armoury which, though they cannot rival the electron microscope in resolving power, have…shown a power of chemical interpretation of structure greater than any other method, and having the additional enormous advantage that they can be used on living material."
J. D. Bernal (1951) The Physical Basis of Life, Routledge and Kegan Paul
[I assume the reference to a Galilean phase of observational biology is intended to refer to the advances brought about by Galileo Galilei's telescopic astronomical observations]
