An example of an analogy used in public science discourse:
"What we did was drill a hole* through the imaging lens [of the microscope] to put the gas in, It's like drilling a hole through a person's heart, because imaging lens is the heart of the machine… even if we had made a fraction of a nanometre error we could have killed the poor machine."
Dame Pratibha Gai, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at York University was being interviewed by Prof. Al-Khalili on an episode ('Dame Pratibha Gai on training atoms to do what we want') of The Life Scientific.
Read examples of scientific analogies
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 lenses of electron microscopes are fields, not material, so possibly 'drill a hole' is meant as a metaphor?]
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.
