An example of analogy used to explain a scientific idea
"Cellular slime moulds spend much of their life living as single-celled organisms, and when times get tough, food gets scarce, they come together to form a multicellular structure, but the individual cells retain their identity as an individual cell. So it is a little bit like, imagine you are playing with bubbles as a child, those bubbles can sometimes stick together, but they remain, you can see the different bubbles, in a kind of clump of bubbles. Now the acellular ones, when they come together, because they also come together from a single-celled state into a kind of merged state, when they come together they form one giant cell, so it is a bit like those bubbles have joined to form one big bubble with one outer membrane. So it's got quite a different way of leaving a single celled state and coming into a merged state."
Dr Merlin Sheldrake (Oxford University and the Vrije University Amsterdam) was talking on an episode ('Slime Moulds') of 'In Our Time'
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.
