Aditi Silawat

Science Writing

The Power of Metaphors in Pitching Science

e live in a scientific world awash in data. Just like water on the planet, knowledge comes from
different sources: people with different kinds of expertise. Esoteric data needs to be made
accessible to the lay audience. A good communicator looks for ways to make complex information
navigable.
Metaphors and analogies (used interchangeably in the article) can be a powerful option for
communicating complex ideas clearly and comprehensibly.
Metaphors are used to make comparisons and contrasts and to create meaning and shared
understanding. Their use is indispensable in science, says Prof. Ed Barr of Carnegie Mellon Universitys H.
John Heinz III College.
As an associate professor of marketing and communication, Prof. Barr has worked with corporate and
technical consultants. A marketing professional himself, he has heard and used metaphors in numerous
tech-talks and presentations.
According to Barr, metaphors are replete in our lives: It is how we perceive the world today.
The metaphorical brain
Im on fire.
My mind isnt operating today.
I need a moment to digest the information.
At least once in a while, weve all had these thoughts.
Why?
Because the way humans think is to understand something new in reference to something.
Linking this to that and that to the other serves as a fundamental fuel and fire of our thoughts. In their
seminal work Metaphors We Live By, George Lakeoff and Mark Johnson describe metaphors as central
to the production of knowledge. What shapes this metaphorical brain?
Language and experience does, answered Dr. Brian MacWhinney, professor of psychology at Carnegie
Mellon University. He has worked closely with researchers like Robert Hoffman on Metaphors in
Science. The human brains capacity for metaphors stems from the evolutionary roots of language and
experiences, MacWhinney said.
Arising from gestures, language became vocal about 200,000 years ago and has continued to evolve
since. Metaphoric expressions are the present day results of language development, said
MacWhinney. Together with play and imitation of past experiences, language generates a metaphor.
Personal experience binds something concrete to something abstract, says Dr. MacWhinney. Humans
handle fresh memories by plugging in old ones. A neuroscience study, This Is Your Brain On
Metaphors, indicates that when a person is accused of dirty acts, for instance, the brain juxtaposes
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Aditi Silawat
Science Writing

those acts with memories of uncleanliness. In the Internet, for example, verbs of movement like surfing,
browsing and visiting can describe how people use the web and its basic architecture.

Pedagogic significance of metaphors

In Science, we can use metaphors deliberately. Erudite metaphors can attract, create interest and make
connections with the audiences and readers, says Prof. Barr.
Metaphors are easily understood because they use a what-is-known language rather than specialized
language.
Connecting known ideas to something that is unknown is not new in science. According to Sanderson
Becks Confucius and Socrates Teaching Wisdom, its a tactic used since the days of Aristotle and
Socrates.
Like the ancient Greeks, scientists presents their work with an awareness of what their audiences are
familiar with. For example, Ernest Rutherford used a then-known solar system to explain his classic
atomic model: Just like planets revolve around sun, electrons orbits around the nucleus in an atom.
Metaphors give a presenter an edge. Presentation coach Victoria Labalme, in her YouTube video Power
of Analogies, says metaphors can make ideas easy to recognize, remember and repeat to others.
Rhonda Adams, an education specialist, tried to do that by comparing the brain to a sunflower. Her
article Your Brain on Play: The Sunflower Analogy explains: The core dark part of the flower is the
nucleus. The dendrites are the petals; they receive the incoming impulses. The stem of the flower is an
axon that carries the outgoing impulses down the axon branches, which resembles the root of the
flower.
In addition to helping people grasp complex concepts, metaphors help with retention by making
concepts more memorable.
Scientist David Deutsch, for example, called the earth "rice pudding"hard on the surface but pliable
and liquid beneathwhen discussing plate tectonics. This gave a great image for a 1960s audience to
latch onto to understand continental drift.
Similarly, marketing experts like Barr use metaphors to explain compound interest by creating what
Labalme calls a mind picture. Compound interest works the way a snowball works. Rolling a snowball
on the ground makes the snowball grow exponentially. Likewise, in compound interest every revolution
creates an increase so that over time, something quite small becomes something very large.
Research work by Fiona MacPherson of the University of Glasgow found humans remember emotions
feelings and imagesmore than facts and figures. Juxtaposing two altogether different things makes it
easier to repeat those things not just to ourselves but to others, said Labalme.
In one example, biologist Aaron Ciechanover explained mutation using a language analogy. Just like a
language is made up of collection of words which are made of letters, combinations of amino acids
make a protein. As letter placement directs the sense of a word [M-O-T-H-E-R vs. M-A-T-H-E-R], genetic
information in DNA directs the sense of a protein: If DNA inserts a wrong amino acid inside proteins, we
have a mutation, just as the a in mother made it into a nonsense word.
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Aditi Silawat
Science Writing

Metaphors can create a lasting impact.

Xavier de Donato Rodriguez and Alfonso Arroyo-Santos study on the function of scientific metaphors
found that creating a sense of enlightenment was crucial for persuading business officials to support
scientific research.
The emotional resonance of metaphors can give people an I get-it impact. Metaphors marry science
and business to create a brand name buzz and value for a product. Business people like Barruse
expressions like data climbs, cloud technology soars, mining data for insights to invoke a sense of
computers being conscious.
In Data is the new oil analogy, for example, data as a natural resource suggests that it has great value
once it is mined and refined. Companies like Amazon and Google use such metaphors not just to
promote their storage technologies but also to connect with public at a subliminal level.
Metaphors are embedded in science and technology. Many scientists have claimed they are essential
not just for teaching science, but for doing science.

Role of metaphors in science discoveries

Many great scientists, such as Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, believed that the use of metaphors
was vital to the development of scientific ideas.
Metaphors are not just effective ways to help people understand new, complex, or difficult concepts,
but they can inspire and trigger innovation, said Prof. Dan Boyarski, head of the School of Design at
Carnegie Mellon University.
Winner of the Design Management Institutes 1999 Muriel Cooper prize, Prof. Boyarski is known for his
novel ways of communicating designs and making them accessible to the global community.
Metaphorical thinking helps explore potential solutions that lead to scientific breakthroughs, he said.
One important example: the entire metaphor of a desktop in early versions of personal computers.
That metaphor helped computer users to grasp the essence of the goal, said Prof. Boyarski.
Imagine the screen as your office, or your desktop. What would you find there? Papers, envelopes, file
folders, writing tools, in and out bins for mail, a few books, and so on." Comparing the computer screen
to a typical office or desktop helped populate the screen with the tools needed to get work done, and
most are still in use today.
New thinking and innovative ideas are often the result of playing around with analogies, said Prof.
Boyarski. By turning spinning plates into cutting-edge quantum physics, Richard Feynman became one of
the greatest players of this game.
In Feymans story, someone in the Cornell University cafeteria tossed a plate in the air. As it went up,
Feyman noticed the plate was spinning and at the same time wobbling. The printed symbol on the plate
went around slower than the wobbling. Feynman used the dynamics behind the motion of the rotating
plate to work on a problem involving the energy of electrons, and that led to a Nobel Prize. Another

Aditi Silawat
Science Writing

example of how metaphors are central to scientific thinking involves the French scientist Sadi Carnots
construction of Carnot cycle for heat engines.
His metaphorical thinking laid the foundation for the later discovery of the equivalence of heat and
work. How can heat be transformed into work if heat is conserved? To answer the question, Carnot
reasoned that in order to do work, there must be a fall in temperature like theres a fall of water in a
waterfall. The same amount of water released on top will be found at the bottom of a pool, with one
difference: It will be less energetic than before. And out came the principle that temperature differences
are necessary for work.
Design pioneers like Boyarski also emphasize using metaphors for good designs in information
technology.
For example, the add to shopping cart button suggests selecting the item off a shelf and putting in the
cart, whereas the checkout function compares billing to going through a checkout line. This design
language helps both web developers and web shoppers understand the overall interaction.
Computer science language is laced with metaphors. Their significance is so great that many software
models are now considered as the metaphors for an actual system. For example, to predict how a real
airliner will behave, an entire airliner can be modeled in software and flown.
Of course, as with any other powerful tool or concept, metaphors can backfire if they arent used well.

Do metaphors simplify things or misrepresent them?

It depends.
According to scientist Caleb Scharfs article In Defence of Metaphors in Science Writing, good
metaphors are incredibly useful, but bad ones create a painful detour.
Some technical communicators argue against the use of metaphors because they can be misconstrued.
For example, lots of people misunderstood the selfish gene metaphor by biologist Richard Dawkins in
his 1976 book of the same title. The ambiguous word selfish raised questions about what it referred
to: whos selfishis it the individual or is it just the gene?
Ambiguity is not the only risk of using metaphors; they also can be oversimplified. One example: the
brain as a computer metaphor.
The human brain is electrical like a computer. But the metaphor fails to capture that the brain is also
driven by fluids like blood and chemicals like hormones. Unlike a computer, the brain runs on emotions
and motivations. It has its own psychological processes.
Clearly, the problem with metaphors isnt their utility but how well chosen they are.
As Einstein said, metaphors should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. To be effective, metaphors
must encompass all the core elements..
So, for instance, electricity can be compared to the flow of water. The electrical current is like the flow
rate of water, voltage is the pressure pushing that water through a pipe, and resistance is the width of
the pipe. And a transistor is like a water valvea mechanism we can use to control the flow of water.
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Science Writing

While a bad metaphor can lead you astray, a good metaphor will work just like a North Star does: It can
help you navigate easily and quickly to a specific point in space. And along the way, who knows? You
may even come across something more interesting an undiscovered constellation perhaps. So, locate
a North Star and decide which stars it points to, and that metaphor may send your mind on an
intergalactic journey.