Metaphors in Natural Science

In the field of science, it is almost impossible to comprehend and express anything without the use of metaphors. Science itself is so abstruse that we humans cannot understand most of the things with our brains, but with the aid from metaphors we are able to do so. In this blog post, I will go over some examples.

First, Let's look at the perspective of physics. In physics, there are millions of assumptions involved, however we tend to ignore them completely and create a diagram that enables to ignore those assumptions. An example of this is the Free-body diagram, a diagram that shows the forces acting on an object. This image below shows all the forces acting on an object sliding from a slanted surface. The forces are: Gravitational, normal, and frictional force. However, in this there are many assumptions included. For instance, it is assuming that the object is sliding in a linear line, whereas in reality is it more likely to slide off diagonally and not at a constant velocity.
Hence, it is not right at the first place to present the diagram on a flat surface, meaning that it is impossible to present something 3D into 2D. Likewise, you can see the same for how physicist universally agreed upon the method of representing circuits. Universally, people share and use the same symbols and notations. Nothing is wrong with these symbols and notations, but what is "wrong' is how physicists casually represent tangled, complicated, and 3-dimensional circuits into untangled, simple, and 2-dimensional diagrams.

Secondly, let's look at the perspective of biology. Normally, if we 'google' human body diagrams, we see a general trend of an average human body with same looking internal organs across images. However, we clearly know that this is not the case. Everyone has different external appearances and probably different-looking internal organs too. Also, when we look at veins, we also see blood. Scientifically, isn't it right to show the sustenance and chemicals in blood? However, we tend to metaphorically ignore them and generalize them to be pure blood.


To conclude, we have seen some obvious, yet great examples of how metaphors are used widely accross physics. Through these examples, we have also learnt that, without these metaphors there is nothing we can comprehend and express in the world of science. Also without these metaphorical and univeral representations, the scientific knowledge we know of wouldn't have existed at all.