Professional development activity 1
You will find below a selection of genuine examples of how scientific ideas have been presented by comparison with other (assumed more familiar) phenomena or ideas.
I have included a range of examples to give you choice in selecting examples of interest/relevance – you are not expected to work through them all! (I think some of these examples are very effective- but I am not entirely convinced by all of them!)
Instructions:
Colleagues in a pair/group should take turns in selecting an example from within or related to their area of science specialism.
[The 'Page contents' list above may help you navigate the page]
The 'specialist' should first ask the [non-specialist] colleague(s) what they think the author of the example was trying to convey.
After selecting an example from your own area of specialism, ask your colleague(s) how they understand it, before proceeding to analyse it together.
Then collectively interrogate the example by considering the following questions:
- What is the scientific target (idea/principle etc.) being introduced/explained?
- If this example was being used in class, what would count as understanding the target (for a specified grade/level of learner?)
- Prerequisites: what would someone have to already understand about the metaphor/analogue to transfer across the intended meaning to the target?*
- Are there aspects of 'negative analogy' (ways the comparison is not like the target) which might confuse a learner?
* Note: As you are a science expert, and so likely already understand the science (target idea), you may well immediately see what the comparison is meant to tell you because you can map it both ways (you can map from the science idea to the analogue, as well as the other way round) and as a teacher you may already have spent time thinking about possible teaching analogies. So, it may be very clear what aspect of the analogue is meant to be focused on and used to explain the target. Try to put yourself in the position of a young learner or layperson who is not so familiar with the science. (This is why I suggested that pairing up across subject specialisms may be useful as there will likely be an uneven understanding of the science with some examples, where one person is closer to the state of a learner and the other is more of an expert.)
Examples:
addiction
"Because pleasure and pain are processed in the same part of the brain and work like opposite sides of the balance, it means for every pleasure there is a cost and that cost is pain. So, if you imagine that in your brain there is a teeter-totter like in a kids' playground, that teeter-totter will tip to one side when we experience pleasure, and the opposite side when we experience pain. But no sooner has that balance tipped to the side of pleasure, for example when I eat a piece of chocolate, then my brain will work very hard to restore a level balance or what neuroscientists call homoeostasis. And it does that not just by bringing the balance level again but first by tipping it an equal and opposite amount to the to the side of pain, that is the after-effect, the come-down. I imagine that as these neuroadaptation gremlins hopping on the pain side of the balance to bring it level again. Now, if we wait long enough, the gremlins hop off and homoeostasis is restored as we go back to our baseline tonic level of dopamine firing. But if we continue to ingest addictive substances or behaviours over very long periods of time, we essentially accumulate so many gremlins on the pain side of our balance that we are in a chronic dopamine deficit state, and that is essentially where we get when we've crossed over into the disease of addiction."
adipogenesis
"The primary regulator of fat cell formation (adipogenesis) is considered to be peroxisome proliferator activated receptor gamma (PPAR-)….This receptor has a large promiscuous pocket that is vulnerable to hacking by multiple obesogenic ligands."
amphidops
"All of these species have a remarkable ability to move about by using a diverse array of swimming, digging, and hopping behaviours. They accomplish this with a virtual Swiss army knife of legs: some are large, others small, some face forward, still others face backward."
anthrax
"…anthrax…lurks in the alveoli awaiting its cellular carriage: our macrophages"
antibiotic resistance
"[bacteria] can change their surface so the antibiotic can no longer get inside the bacterium, or develop antibiotic bilge pumps that prevent the drug from building up. Alternatively they may create new metabolic pathways that mean they can bypass the antibiotic's roadblock."
bacteria
"I use the analogy that bacteria behave a bit like teenagers. They're constantly messaging each other and signalling when there is a high concentration of bacteria present in the same location by throwing a party when the parents are out of town."
black holes
"A black hole is a region of space where you have just crammed so much stuff into a such a small space, that gravity kind of goes into overdrive, it grabs onto everything, and it won't let go, and that includes light, so even if a light beam goes into a black hole it just kind of gets sucked in and stays there."
brain structure
"In earlier centuries people had believed that thoughts and emotions were carried through the head via hollow tunnels, but now the brain became a series of discrete segments, real estate, if you will, some of its swampy, some of it stately, but all of its perhaps subject to human renovation."
brain surgery
"Surgeons choose the brain targets on the basis of results of past lobotomies and cingulotomies, noting which lesions brought with them relief. The problem is, all sorts of lesions have attenuated anxiety and depression in desperate patients, lesions to the left or right, up or down, here or there. Without a single sweet spot, the possibilities are disturbingly numerous. No one in his right mind would get on a ship if the captain wasn't sure where to steer. But of course that's the point. Psychiatric patients who have this surgery are no longer truly in their right mind. They get on board because this is their last lifeboat."
cancer and the immune system
"The Y-negative cells cause an immune evasive environment in the tumour, and that, if you will, paralyses, the T cells, and exhausts them, makes them tired and ineffective, and this prevents the Y-negative tumour from being rejected, therefore allowing it to grow much better."
chemical reaction
"in the ortho lithiation of an S-trifluoromethyl sulfoximine-substituted benzene…the aggregates 'cannibalise' the base and stop it from reacting…A team…has now found various 'base-eating' aggregates."
comet tails
"And just as a gale blows smoke ahead of a steamship that is travelling down-wind, so the pressure of sunlight carries the more easily visible dust storm ahead of a comet when it is climbing away from the sun."
development
"…the acorn forms numerous buds, from every one of which emerges an organ subject…All organ subjects with their organ melodies join together to form the symphony of the organism of the oak…The process of heightened subjectification of the cell tone to organ melody to organism symphony stands in direct contradiction to any mechanical process that represents the effect of one object on another object…. As in the composition of a duet, the two voices have to be composed for each other note for note, point for point, the meaning factors in Nature stand in a contrapunctual relation to the meaning utilisers"
discovery of Neptune
"Uranus…was not moving as expected. It persistently wandered away from its predicted path, so that clearly it was being perturbed by some unknown body. … It was a sort of cosmic detective problem – they could see the 'victim', Uranus, and they had to find the 'culprit'."
electromagnetic spectrum
"…the radio frequency spectrum is the resource where all these radio systems, 5G wifi and so on, work and that is a resource that is limited and it is not possible to indefinitely expand, so that's why it is absolutely natural and inevitable to look beyond the radio spectrum.
If you go into a hotel in Summer in a warm place, the swimming pool is often crowded with people and you can't really swim the way you want, but visible light allows us to swim in the oceans and that is what LiFi will enable…"
epigenetics
"There are two waves of genome-wide epigenetic erasure and reconstruction, that happen during the life-time of an individual. The first one happens during the development of the eggs and sperms when the epigenetic slate that is established in the cells that are going to give rise to eggs and sperm, is wiped clean, and basically your D.N.A. is epigenetically naked. And then it starts to build new epigenetic modifications that are specific to an egg or are specific top sperm. And then the second wave of epigenetic erasure and reconstruction happens immediately upon fertilisation. So that egg is fertilised by a sperm, and then immediately the epigenetic slate is wiped clean again."
faecal transplants
"These nasty infections are the most extreme, if you like, that pretty much wipe out most of our normal species. So … we might, say, start with a thousand species and people [with C. diff – Clostridium difficile] might be down to just ten or so, different ones and so nasty ones take over. It's a bit like a garden that has gone very badly wrong and you have put too much herbicide all over it and it looks like an Arizona back yard with a few burning tyres in it. It's very easy for things to take over that and what we want to get, is by putting these bugs in there, to create a really healthy garden that gets back to normal that looks like a nice English country garden with lots of blooms, and really good soil, and lots of plants interacting with each other, and that's the way to think about these microbes, but to do that, to get to this nice rosy picture of a country garden you have to go through yucky stages first."
fly’s Unwelt
"threads of the [spider's] web are spun so finely that a fly's eye with its crude visual elements cannot spot the web and the fly flies without warning to its doom, just as we, completely off guard, drink water which contains cholera bacilli invisible to our eye."
genes
"One gene occupies one region of a chromosome containing many genes, much like one song occupies one region of a music tape containing many songs overall."
genome
"The genome at every level resembles a musical score in which the same musical phrases are repeated in different ways to make vastly different songs."
grand unified theories
"Cosmology could indeed separate the sheep from the goats, in distinguishing grand unified theories that were plausible from those that were not, but a whole lot of sheep remained."
haemoglobin
"So the binding of one oxygen molecule to one subunit of an empty haemoglobin complex greatly encourages the binding of oxygen to the other three available sites. This makes the multi-subunit haemoglobin complex a bit like a four-seater car in which the first person into the car unlocks the door for another three passengers….An opposite effect occurs when loaded haemoglobin reaches a tissue in need of oxygen: the loss of one oxygen molecule from one subunit causes a conformational change in the complex which allows the other three oxygen molecules to be off-loaded much more readily. A suitable analogy to this would be an unstable four-man boat, since, if one man jumps overboard, he may rock the boat sufficiently to make the other three fall out!"
HCl molecule
"Consider the molecule of hydrogen chloride, one atom of hydrogen and one atom of chlorine. The hydrogen atom is lighter, and swings around the heavier, near-stationary chlorine atom like a discus in the hand of the spinning athlete. It is as if the athlete could spin only at certain speeds: no faster, no slower, and nothing intermediate."
histamine
"histamine is just a compound that cells use to signal each other when they are damaged or something is wrong. And so once one cell triggers, it's a bit like we've all seen that nuclear reaction example with the ping-pong balls, that's a bit what it's like with histamine. So, once one ping-pong ball goes off, the cells next to it get the signal that something is wrong, also release histamine."
HIV
"Information is transferred by gene in much the same way as it is by words. For each, evolution is inevitable…For the human immunodeficiency virus, changes within a patient – a mere shift in genetic accent – or in the particles that pass from one victim to the next track its evolution over months or years. If (and the assumption is a bold one) the limbs of the AIDS tree follow the same rules as those of its twig, the epidemics of today, it should be possible to work out the past growth of any branch, however ancient. To compare the human immunodeficiency virus with its distant relatives – the Chinese-speakers of the viral world – hints at the origin of the plague itself."
hydrogel
"[the scientist] was looking for a way to get the protein chains in his hydrogel to stick together in a way that would increase the stiffness without making the material brittle. And, he and his team did this by jumbling them up, using a process called entanglement, which he likens to something that happens when you are eating spaghetti…Because the individual spaghetti strands, when you try to pull one, so probably you are going to get a few, together, because they are kind of 'entangled', so they are not, kind of, isolated individual ones."
immunity
"And the innate immune system is a bit like a, it's a bit like an antiviral software that we are all born with that fights infection."
inheritance of acquired characteristics
"He [botanist J. W. H. Harrison] went on to set out a theory by which chemicals eaten by the moth somehow found their way into just that part of the chromosome that controlled the moth's ability to survive the effects of those chemicals. John Maynard Smith quoted another biologist who described the inheritance of acquired characteristics as being 'as if a man sent a telegram in English to China and it arrived of its own accord translated into Chinese'."
'life-cycles' of stars
"We can test our theories, not only because we understand the physics, but because we can look at lots of stars. It is rather like if you had never seen a tree before, and you wandered around in a forest for a day, you can infer the life cycles of trees, you'd see saplings and big trees, etcetera. And so even though our lifetime is minuscule compared to the lifetime of a stable star, we can infer the population and life cycles of stars observationally and the theory does corroborate that fairly well."
mass-energy equivalence
"But if every gramme of material contains this tremendous energy, why did it go so long unnoticed? The answer is simple enough: so long as none of the energy is given off externally, it simply cannot be observed. It is as though a man who is fabulously rich should never spend or give away a cent; no one could tell how rich he was."
microbiome
"The microbiome has this capacity to signal from the mother to the developing baby, and we call that orchestral signalling. The microbiome has so many different molecular languages that it speaks, that you can think of it in terms of an orchestra with different bits of the band doing different bits of important signalling that educate the immune system or might help you metabolise food for example."
monoclonal antibodies
"You don't need to know where all the cells are because your mAbs [monoclonal antibodies] will do the legwork for you, incessantly scouring the body for their target destination like tiny, demented postal workers without a good union."
neurons
"So any single nerve cells acts like a tiny automatic ballot machine, assessing the number of 'yes' and 'no' votes entering it at any one time and either firing or not firing depending on which type of vote predominates at any one time. …Nerve cells receive electrochemical signals from other cells, and each signal represents a 'yes' or a 'no' vote in an election to determine whether the cell should fire."
neurotransmitters
"The idea that one neurotransmitter is solely responsible for depression, we have long moved on from that as researchers and mental health professionals in the field, as we were saying I think that serotonin does have a role to play in emotion and mood, and it may be important to some extent in depression, but it will be as one player in a rather complex orchestral piece, it is not doing a solo, and so it is really difficult to pull apart these different processes and their role in depression."
Oort cloud
"If the 'new' comets seem to be coming from starting points half a light-year out, that is where they have been in residence since the birth of the Solar System. Such is the leading idea about the origin of comets, that is to say the theory not disfavoured in Cometsville. All the other categories of comets are, in this scheme, pilgrims from the coolest provinces of the Solar System who lost their return tickets and are trapped in shorter orbits around the Sun, waiting either to perish in the heat or to be evicted into interstellar space and exiled from the Sun for ever. But the theory requires the existence of a large population of unseen comets to sustain the pilgrimage, and thus it endorses the opinion of Johann Kepler that 'there are as many comets in the sky as fishes in the sea'. The devotion of comets to the gravitational faith that unites the Solar System appears in this: their first journeys from the outer darkness to the altar of the Sun take a very long time indeed, for the sake of a fleeting visit. When the priests of this faith, the celestial mechanicians on the Earth, interrogate 'new' comets now arriving in the Space Age they admit to travelling for several million years."
parallax
"The planets wander slowly around the sky, whereas to all intents and purposes the stars do not – hence the old term of Fixed stars. And the reason can be summed up in one word: Distance. The farther way a moving object is, the slower is seems to go. A bird flying between the tree-tops appears to shift much more quickly than an aircraft seen against the clouds, even though its true speed is very much less."
planetary rings
"For us astronomers, [the rings seen around some planets] are the blood spatter on the walls of a crime scene. When we look at the rings of giant planets, it's evidence something catastrophic happened to put that material there"
plant toxicity
"When any part of the plant [Monkshood, a.k.a. Wolfsbane] is ingested, the aconitine is absorbed through the gut and goes to work. It binds to receptors that help regulate the muscle cells' sodium-ion channels, key components of the nervous system and cardiac cells (i.e. the heart). This action keeps the channels open, allowing sodium to flow freely into the cell. Unable to repolarize, the cells are stuck in a state of "open", and paralysis sets in. To use a car analogy, if the valves in your car's engine open up, but then won't close, it's dead in the water. Just like aconitine victims."
p-n junction
"The holes giving [current] If are climbing up the hill. The holes that give [current] Ig wander randomly in the n region until by chance they come to the brow of the hill and slide down…Any less energetic holes attempting the ascent will slide back…A hill of any height will urge ahead all holes that stray to its brow."
protective antigen
"PA [protective antigen] is the muscled henchman of the group that attaches to the surface of our macrophages and gathers EF [oedema factor] and LF [lethal factor] to its side. It then slices a slit in the wall of the cell, like a burglar cutting a hole in a glass jewellery case, which allows the other two toxins to penetrate deep inside."
quanta
"Pianistic thinking cannot allow violinistic glissandi: pianos allow a C#, or a D, but nothing in between. Classical physics regarded nature as a complicated violin: that is, differential equations were always in place; but we cannot think of the atom thus. λ depends on the speed of the particle, so a particle in an atomic orbit can only run at certain speeds. It cannot run at intermediate speeds; it cannot exist at intermediate speeds."
quantum theory
"Quantum theory says that a light photon can exist in a strange mixture of two possible states until it is measured – only then does it decide which it is going to be. It's as if a child were both a boy and girl right up to the point it was born and it was only at that moment that a coin was tossed and the 50:50 decision made."
radioactive decay
"I tell the students I'm going to heat up the oil; I'm going to give the kernels some energy, making them unstable and they're going to want to pop. I show them under the visualiser, then I ask, 'which kernel will pop first?' We have a little competition. Why do I do this? It links to nuclear decay being random. We know an unstable atom will decay, but we don't know which atom will decay or when it will decay, just like we don't know which kernel will pop when….I usually follow this lesson with the idea of half-lives. The concept of half-lives now makes sense. Why are there fewer unpopped kernels over time? Because they're popping. Why do radioactive materials become less radioactive over time? Because they're decaying."
Rorschach test
"If the Rorschach was an X-ray, the hidden but all-important personality was the invisible skeleton people wanted to see, and projection was what made it visible. …The Rorschach 'seemed like a mental X-ray machine', recalled a graduate student at the time. 'You could solve a person by showing them a picture'…The Rorschach was an X-ray, the test that couldn't be faked any more than a slide could fool a slide projector."
space-time
"While time and space were relative, the combination of them was absolute. This is similar to how people facing in opposite directions will give different directions for turning left or right but can both agree about whether you should turn north or south."
stimulated emission of radiation
"According to Einstein's theory, an electron in an atom can be pushed into a higher energy state when it is hit by a photon, leaving it like a bucket of water sitting over an open door. Another photon, hitting that electron, would not only be re-emitted itself, but would trigger the electron to release the stored up energy as a second photon – as if the bucket was knocked off the door by the stream of water from a hose, resulting in a doubled downpour."
Sources
These examples are taken from the writings of scientists themselves, popular science books, reports by journalists, and broadcast reports – the sources and other examples can be found under science analogies, science similes and science metaphors. (Some of these quotes have been excised from a wider 'text' that would have offered additional context for understanding the comparison being used.)
