An example of making an everyday comparisons to explain the scale of a scientific phenomenon:
RP: "This is sort of looking at, I dunno, a light bulb at the distance of the moon, and then there is another small sort of firefly just next to it, something like that."
SH: "…it's 52 milliarcseconds [angular separation of Betelgeuse and its 'companion']…it's really close, right. So, I use the analogy of taking a car, and its two headlights. So, they are about 2 metres apart, let's say, if you put that car at fifty thousand miles away, it's headlights would be separated by 52 millliarcseconds"
RP: "That's 80 000 km for our world audience."
SH: "There you go yeah. And one of the headlights is 250 times fainter than the other one."
Dr Steve B. Howell (NASA Ames Research Center) was interviewed by Roland Pease on an episode ('Discovering Betelgeuse's Betelbuddy') of BBC Science in Action.
Read about quotidian comparisons
A document listing a wide range of examples of science analogies, similes, metaphors and other comparisons, drawn from diverse sources, can be downloaded using this link: 'Creative Comparisons: Making Science Familiar through Language. An illustrative catalogue of figurative comparisons and analogies for science concepts.'
